What's happening on the little stage?
We get oodles of news on the national level, the big stage of the secular/atheist movement, but what's happening on our smaller stages? What are our local groups doing?
I really enjoy attending the monthly meetings of my local group, Fayetteville Freethinkers, Arkansas, and I also take time out to attend the meetings of a few other nearby groups - often, just to see what's going on. There's a good deal of variety out there and I encourage everyone to get their fill of it by visiting outside their own neighborhood once in a while. Here's why...
This month, my own group featured a Doug Kruger "original"... What a hoot. Doug has been giving presentations to our group for years. He's the author of "What is Atheism: A Short Introduction," he teaches at the collage level and he's a highly polished speaker - a real piece of human inventiveness especially when it comes to selecting topics. This month he offered an overview on dowsing, of all things. It's the art of ( ...the art of?) finding underground water, lost and hidden items, and a lot of other sorts of foolishness.
The conclusion: If dowsers would turn their dowsing attention and skills (...skills?) to seeking out nonsensical thinkers with foolish beliefs (and if dowsing worked) the seeking dowsers would end up chasing their own tails around endlessly, just like little puppies often do and they'd look just as brainless as they do when seeking out other such silliness as they claim to be able to do.
You can't guess what fun it is to look critically at the wacko ideas humans come up with... at all of it. Science and history, philosophy and ethics, politics and government are certainly not to be slighted in the least. Knowing these things is important; yet, doing without an occasional debunking of this and that or failing to poke some fun at the silliness some segments of our societies believe, kind of runs a close second in many, many categories.
Attend your local meeting... Don't miss it.
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We get oodles of news on the national level, the big stage of the secular/atheist movement, but what's happening on our smaller stages? What are our local groups doing?I really enjoy attending the monthly meetings of my local group, Fayetteville Freethinkers, Arkansas, and I also take time out to attend the meetings of a few other nearby groups - often, just to see what's going on. There's a good deal of variety out there and I encourage everyone to get their fill of it by visiting outside their own neighborhood once in a while. Here's why...
This month, my own group featured a Doug Kruger "original"... What a hoot. Doug has been giving presentations to our group for years. He's the author of "What is Atheism: A Short Introduction," he teaches at the collage level and he's a highly polished speaker - a real piece of human inventiveness especially when it comes to selecting topics. This month he offered an overview on dowsing, of all things. It's the art of ( ...the art of?) finding underground water, lost and hidden items, and a lot of other sorts of foolishness.
The conclusion: If dowsers would turn their dowsing attention and skills (...skills?) to seeking out nonsensical thinkers with foolish beliefs (and if dowsing worked) the seeking dowsers would end up chasing their own tails around endlessly, just like little puppies often do and they'd look just as brainless as they do when seeking out other such silliness as they claim to be able to do.
You can't guess what fun it is to look critically at the wacko ideas humans come up with... at all of it. Science and history, philosophy and ethics, politics and government are certainly not to be slighted in the least. Knowing these things is important; yet, doing without an occasional debunking of this and that or failing to poke some fun at the silliness some segments of our societies believe, kind of runs a close second in many, many categories.
Attend your local meeting... Don't miss it.
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