Davis Area FreeThinkers Meets Twice

I've been a bad blogger these last few weeks and haven't even spent a whole lot of time on twitter. I haven't abandoned the internet, I've just been busy lately. I want to describe how my freethinker meetup in my town has been going. We've met twice now at an outdoor venue and have finally found a coffee shop not too crowded on a Monday night to house a group of six to ten people.

We've talked a lot at both meetings about why we are there. Atheism is nothing more than a disbelief in god and that is where our expectations of similarity of thought ends. Some of us are super liberal, some more conservative, some are open to the question of ghosts and "energy" and some are very interested in the Jesus myth controversy. What has brought us all together is that there is a trend in this nation of religious people trying to get their religion passed into our secular laws. The push for anti-scientific curriculum in schools, deny citizens their rights based on ancient biblical morals and uphold a system that favors one class over the others. If not for that, we wouldn't even need to meet.

I think this is pretty typical for all the groups that have started across the US. Despite our differences on any other topic, we come together to to do two things: 1) discuss philosophy and theology and arguments for and against god, and 2) continue to fight for the separation of church and state. I remember there was a time when the internet community was fighting for those two things, but lately it's been a cluster-fuck of SJW's trying to witch-hunt anyone out of the atheist movement who would rather stick to those two topics. I'm watching it crumble online, and so I've started this group IRL because that is where the real work is being done. It's a place where people say things like, "PZ who?" It's beautiful to find out these assholes aren't as important as they pretend to be.

I'm as excited as ever to have a group. This month we'll hopefully be comfortable enough to come up with topics that we can spend some time on, as it's all really open right now. Two of us are reading Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian. I think we'll have a lot to talk about.