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Tuesday, January 31, 2012
It wouldn't be advISSAble to miss this week's meeting!
Monday, January 30, 2012
The Man Behind the Atheist Temples
It has recently been announced that Alain de Botton has plans to build a series of temples specifically for atheists in the UK. It is, if nothing else, an interesting idea, so I thought it might be worth learning a bit more about Alain to get some background on why he's doing it. It seems like this guy is kind of everywhere- In addition to being a writer (and apparently an architect), he and his colleagues set up something called the "School of Life." Instead of describing it to you I'll just copy a blurb from his own description:
So, the idea is that the "School" offers different workshops that could be useful for people, not in a spiritual sense, but a more rational one. Examples of courses include "How to Find a Job You Love," an Urban Wilderness Retreat, and "Photographing London." Each of these are led by people who have some sort of expertise in the area they are discussing. It seems to touch upon the less obvious aspects of things we should value and go towards the more abstract.
The School of Life also offers "sermons" where experts talk about a wide variety of topics, such as one sermon where Tony Buzan, who claims to be the inventor of Mind Mapping (and at the very least has written a book on the subject), discusses the value of daydreaming, and how to hone your daydreaming skills (or something along those lines).
The School has a passionate belief in making learning relevant – and so runs courses in the important questions of everyday life. Whereas most colleges and universities chop up learning into abstract categories (‘agrarian history’ ‘the 18th century English novel’), The School of Life titles its courses according to things we all tend to care about: careers, relationships, politics, travels, families. An evening or weekend on one of its courses is likely to be spent reflecting on such matters as your moral responsibilities to an ex partner or how to resolve a career crisis.The School offers communal meals, holidays and a beautiful shop with fascinating gift vouchers and other items. It also has a division offering psychotherapy for individuals, couples or families – and it does so in a completely stigma-free way. For the normally reserved British, it must be a first to have an institution that offers therapy from an ordinary high street location and moreover, treats the idea of having therapy as no more or less strange than having a haircut or pedicure, and perhaps a good deal more useful.The School attempts to put learning and ideas back to where they should always have been – right in the middle of our lives.
The School of Life also offers "sermons" where experts talk about a wide variety of topics, such as one sermon where Tony Buzan, who claims to be the inventor of Mind Mapping (and at the very least has written a book on the subject), discusses the value of daydreaming, and how to hone your daydreaming skills (or something along those lines).
Friday, January 27, 2012
Religious People Have Sex, Too? Whoa, Man. Whoa.
For the last few centuries, apparently, religious folks have had absolutely no problem making families through totally ordinary, non-kinky, Sunday-school appropriate copulation. I'm talking about every married couple in history, ever. But... Recently they've gotten into some more 'modern' stuff. Since apparently consummating your deity of choice's everlasting love in the back of Dad's pickup followed by a hastily arranged shotgun wedding is becoming passé, over the past few years there's been a sharp rise of websites offering advice and products for the sexually entrepreneurial religious couple, be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. And these are not basement-quality shady back alley vendors, folks, these are successful online storefronts in a growing industry. So, why is it suddenly acceptable for pious folks to have a desire for anything beyond the sexual vanilla?
One possible reason could be the growing trend of churches that offer and encourage couples counseling services, and even the amount of Christian schools that have a bare minimum of sex education. Hardly due to pressure from the inside, mind you, but because of extensive pressure from parents, who are perhaps not too eager for their children to have the same sexual misadventures and bad experiences as they did. Their sex ed programs are still usually based on the idea of abstinence as the only method of birth control, of course, instead of discussing birth control. As for counseling, there's a whole list of sites that eagerly put religious couples in touch with mediators, and these services, too, are expanding. Just as in their treatment of sex (and of little boys, perhaps), it seems that some of our larger religious institutions may have finally come to the conclusion that ignoring problems doesn't solve them.
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| Any attempt at a relevant image would be very, very naughty, so use your imagination. |
Thursday, January 26, 2012
The Magic of Reality--What We Should be Reading Next
As many of you may know, ISSA has created its own freethought library to help educate members with the wisdom of some of skepticism's brightest minds. The latest book I hope to soon add to our collection is The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins, which was published only a few months ago.
While this book is written for older children, adults will find it just as engaging. As a lifelong atheist, I was impressed at the amount I learned from it. Possibly its greatest strength is the clarity with which it explains concepts like evolution: Why there are no “in between” species, as creationists are so fond of pointing to as “checkmate, atheists!” Dawkins asks us to imagine a stack of pictures—one of us, one of our father, one of his father, so on and so forth until we hit our 185 millionth great grandfather - a fish.
Dawkins then directs us to the first hundred or so pictures…they are all clearly human, but each is a little different. He then explains that this is the idea behind evolution—gradual change, each child being the same species as its parents, but a little bit different, and eventually the 50,000th or so great grandchild would be unable to create viable offspring with the original. That is when we consider it a different species.
When creationist friends of mine brought up the “in-between” argument, I was always awful at explaining why exactly they were wrong. The argument was there in my head, but expressing it in clear, concise terms was always difficult for me, But in Dawkins' book, I have found foundational scientific concepts explained in a straightforward manner, helping me articulate the evidence for unduly controversial science. Not only atheists looking for a great way to express concepts, but religious people wondering what science has to offer, will find this book fascinating.
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| You know a book is good when it has a sexy cover like this one! |
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| The resemblance is striking...I think I have his eyes. |
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| Not quite. |
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Have you been touched by hISSA noodly appendage?
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Tuesday, January 17, 2012
The spring semester ISSA here, and we've got a new meeting time!
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