Meeting Minutes for August 31st and 7th

Meeting Minutes August 31st, 2011

Ice breakers (2truths&1lie)

About SSA/History

Websites
-Facebook (Events, posting, links, discussion, and such)
-Wordpress Blog (Blog posts, meeting minutes, pictures, constitution, and such)
-secularstudents.org (Elections, Mission, donations, speakers thingy, requirements for affiliation, political issues)

SSA video (Youtube acting glitchy)

Symphony of Science – A Wave of Reason
Pizza/foods
Free Discussion

Meeting Minutes 2/7/2011

Ice Breakers-”What would you do with a robot?”

Yahya describes interfaith panel

Sarah talks about Greta Christina (Atheism and Sexuality)

9/11 memorial cross lawsuit
-Stewart Video
-Discussion
-American Atheists (description, brief history, and “in-movement” talk about them.)
Michael Stahl’s atheist registry
-Direct reading from blog
-What are you? (Atheist, agnostic, etc.), Are you out? How does the list make you feel?

Where is God?

by Echo

When I was I child growing up in Virginia, Minnesota, we had a raspberry patch in our back yard. It was an interesting place to spend my time, because it produced delicious fruit and harbored some of the coolest, most colorful spiders I had ever seen.

I was a little hellion since I can remember. I had a huge problem with any authority. This led to my being frequently grounded. Since the raspberry patch was in our yard, it’s no surprise that some of my early memories take place there.

Amidst the fruit and the sunshine, I contemplated a lot of things that a lot of kids don’t think about at that age. I was less interested in fashion trends and social popularity than I was in the the deepest questions that humankind has ever pondered. Some of these questions were:

Why am I here?

Am I here?

Where did I come from?

Who made this place?

What does it mean to be conscious?

It’s Sunday morning and my dad gently wakes me up. He’s prepared oatmeal with brown sugar and apples cooked in. I smile and am relieved that the nightmares are over for a period. Nightmares plagued me as a young boy.

Toward the end of my bowl of oatmeal, it hits me with great excitement: I’ve just gotten the magic wand out of level six. That would give me a much better chance of finally reaching the end of the labyrinth. The Legend of Zelda for the NES was the game, and I was obsessed. My parents would let me play for an hour each day, and then came the inevitable command from one of them:

“Die your guy.”

Oh how I hated that phrase. Perhaps it was more diplomatic than “kill your guy,” but in either case, I hated the phrase. In The Legend of Zelda, you can’t save your game until your character dies. An hour’s worth of laboring, crushed by a command to bugger off and kill yourself. Since I had the blue ring, it took me twice as long to die. Each day, the death of Link was a slow and painful one.

Dad reminds me that it’s Sunday morning and directs me to dress up nicely so that we can go to church. Every since that very young age, I have made a connection between clothes that looked nice and clothes that were uncomfortable. My parents had keenly tracked down the most uncomfortable clothes available in any store. They said they looked nice. I didn’t give a shit how they looked. They chafed my legs and made me feel like I was choking.

Some kids went off to Sunday School when they got to church. My dad always preferred that I stay with him for the adult service. The content of the sermon frequently eluded me. They used a lot of Old English, and I would always find myself retreated back into my own mind for two hours. I might have slept if the pews had been made by a more compassionate carpenter.

“To thee that makes pews, from He take a cue.”

Throughout my experiences at church, I always kept in mind what I thought was a fair possibility: that the pastor and all the others in the congregation were deluded. I never saw Jesus or God, and I was skeptical that they existed. My dad is a smart guy, so I asked him questions about obvious inconsistencies that I found on a regular basis. Inevitably, the reason for believing in and following such an illogical and inconsistent doctrine boiled back down to one thing: faith. As it happened, I was quite lacking in the faith department. If I couldn’t verify something, I was usually skeptical about it.

Eventually, the onslaught of questions I asked my dad forced him to recognize that there were a lot of logical inconsistencies in believing in the Christian God. He began to question his own beliefs.

I don’t think my story is uncommon, but the reason I’m writing this article is because I believe that it is dangerous and destructive to teach children to accept things on faith and without any evidence at all. To do so is to plant a seed that will grow into a destructive delusion.

I’d like to illustrate the long term destructive power of having older and supposedly wiser people telling you that there’s a magic man in the sky. On a particularly bad day in 2008, I started screaming at the sky as if there were someone there. At this point I was 22 years old and had been agnostic for 15 years. I believe this is indicative of a very serious mental problem that was introduced by my mentors before the age of seven. The damage introduced to the human mind by the dogma that is necessarily inherent in religion is not helpful nor is it even innocent. It is a dangerous, destructive force that is working against the advancement of the human race.

I’m currently enrolled at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota for physics. If I believed I could solve questions that were difficult to answer with faith, it would leave me in quite a predicament when I was doing my math homework. If, instead of showing my work on a long system of equations, I based all of my answers on faith, my math professor would tell me that my method was unsatisfactory. If I continued to solve problems in this fashion after being warned, I would likely be dismissed from the class until I was ready to take it seriously.

I expect people to think about things and deduce them logically. I don’t expect people to agree with me by any means, or to come to the same conclusions. But if you haven’t thought about why you believe what you believe, you may want to consider doing so. It has been a worthwhile endeavor for me. In order to progress independently and as a society of human beings, we must be critical and cognizant. Our survival depends on it.

Morality with and without God

   By Joseph

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who came to our event Ask a Secular Student on Wednesday. We had a good turnout and we were asked some questions that facilitated some well-done responses from the members, although I feel some of our responses were drawn out too much and we could have answered some more questions that need addressing. Hopefully, we can do this next year and get some more inquiries from the student body.

Now that the last event has passed, we have another coming this Monday the 18th, Morality with and without God with August Berkshire from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Saint Cloud Public Library. The talk is hosted by Central Minnesota Freethinkers. He is the president of Minnesota Atheists and serves on several boards (Camp Quest of Minnesota and Freedom from Religion Foundation) so we’d like you to come and check it out with us.

Minutes for 4/6/2011 Meeting

Our first official action at this meeting was welcoming our visitors from the newly founded SSA at the Itasca Community College with a package (read: hastily prepared plastic bag) of SSA liturature.

Then we decided the panel line up for the “Ask a Secular Student Day” event:

First thirty minutes:

1. Diana
2. Jeremy
3. Yahya
4. Grant
5. Chris
6. Joe

Second thirty minutes:

1. Diana
2. Kjell
3. Eli
4. Drew
5. Ben
6. Sarah

After that Ben used some kind of techno-wizardry so we could see what he was doing on his laptop on the projecter while he was designing the flyer for the “Ask a Secular Student Day” event.

Then Grant read one of Sarah’s favorite passages from the Bible.

At the end of the meeting I asked if any members would be interested in a “Send an Atheist to Church” charity fundraiser. Eli, Jess, Ben, Diana, Grant, Chris, Sarah, Kjell, and Yahya said they were interested.

Ask a Secular Student Day

 By Joseph

It’s that time of year when the snow is almost all melted away and everyone is coming out of the woodworks for the outdoors, and what better time than to come out of the works ourselves as secular students? This upcoming wednesday will be Ask a Secular Student Day from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. in Atwood in the Mississippi Room. This will an opportune time for all you curious george types out there that have questions for members of our organization. The goal is to clear up certain misconceptions about atheism and give the faithful a chance to get an indepth understanding about who atheists are through active dialogue. The members who will be answering your questions will be Sarah, Jeremy, Chris, Ben, Eli, Diana, Jeremy, Drew, Yahya, Grant, Kjell, and me.

We have a moment not to lose on occasions like these, so don’t be shy and come on by!

Meeting Minutes March 30, 2011

Last Wednessday’s meeting was very busy. We started with an update on next year’s budget. We now have less money for Chris Steadman’s speaking fee, but at least we have money for printing and operating.

 Then, after a brief discussion on tabling etiquette, we turned to a University Chronicle article “In Defense of Literature” by Jack Lofgren. The general consensus was that the article unfairly insinuates that atheists cannot appreciate art or literature because “the Atheist does not accept things that cannot be measured by humans”, and the SSA will be sending a letter to the editor explaining our concerns.

Looking for a mood lightener we opened discussion to thoughts about Jen McCreight’s speech last month. James said that he really enjoyed it and was glad to hear more about the modern femenist movements, Joe said he was interested in McCreight’s defenition of feminism, Katie said that she liked how Jen was able to keep most of her speech light hearted, and Grant was suprised to learn that ther were anti-woman sentiments in Bhuddism and Hinduism as well as those more familiar to us (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam)

Our last order of business was getting voluteers for Ask a Secular Student Day which as no problem at all. Our volunteers include Chris, Ben, Grant, Jeremy, Diana, Eli, Joseph, Sarah, and yours truly. Cake was mentioned.

Meeting Minutes March 23, 2011

Here are the meeting minutes from the meeting held on March 23rd.

Tabling Guidelines

Purpose of Tabling:

Answering general education questions, advertising group meetings, events, services, and materials, and building and maintaining a positive rapport with the campus

Tips:

• Stay positive
• Smile and say hello
• Be inviting, not harassing
• Keep your cool and an even volume
• Be firm but gentile
• Keep front of table clear and visible-keep social congregating behind or to the side
• Do not point or approach
• Ask rather than assume

Points of note:

• Respect ideas, people
• Effective Q&A
• Avoid confrontation
• Be a good and respectful representative of the organization

What are we?

• We are an advocacy and service group
  • We want to advocate our point of view; present it in an effective way
  • We provide a service by educating the general population and by providing a community for secular people.

Tabling is:

• Voluntary
• Fun
• A Responsibility
  • You are the public face for the organization at that point, so please make us look good.
• A Privilege

 Icebreaker:

• Name-position
• major
• Favorite pen color and why?

Ask an Atheist Secular Student

• April 13^th
• Panel Discussion? Tabling?
  • Take Question submissions?
    • Email, paper, twitter, etc. for anonymity
    • Everyone “on the same page”
    • Start taking question submissions and stuff now

Sweeping Generalizations

          By Joseph

It’s been a over a week since I last posted on here since Jen McCreight’s “God’s Lady Problem: Breaking Up with Abusive Supernatural Beings” speech last tuesday. Her speech lasted about an hour with follow up questions that kept the momentum of the night going for us. She touched up on the sexist elements that are present in most religions that make women second class citizens in the eyes of men and gave the audience a rundown of the definition of feminism (the advocation for gender equality, not women being given “special rights”). It was an overall good talk, so we hope Jen can come around a second time for future events.

So here I come to the main topic of this post, sweeping generalizations. One of our members, Benjamin, had made a facebook post of this article that caught my eye, “In Defense of Literature” from the University Chronicle opinion section. The writer, Jack Lofgren, had talked to one of our members and the discussion included an argument as to whether art and literature are useful to humanity. Our member supposedly mentioned that literature produces no testable results and said that the English Department must be disbanded because “art is simply decoding what the artist is “trying to say” and literary theory and english professors get in the way of this”. Jack did not take this well and he goes on to make several valid points about why literature is important (Benjamin made several comments himself  explaining why people should appreciate literature); however, he makes a generalization of atheists based off his own view that I can’t help but point out, “It is fitting, then, that the atheist would be the strongest critic of art and literature, for the atheist does not accept things that cannot be measured by humans”. This isn’t something I can agree with him on in totality. For one, the position of athiests concerning the supernatural and untestable claims does not necessarily apply to literature, since most of us realize literature in general is abstract and subjective to begin with, it’s not something any reasonable athiest would demand a test for. For books or scriptures like the Bible or the Quran that claim absolute truth, we will hold those to testability because they are making a claim that apparently applies to an objective reality, i.e. ours.

I don’t know who Jack was talking to when this conversation came up, and I don’t have everyone’s thoughts on everything so I can’t comment on who says the English Department must be disbanded, but they don’t represent my views on literature or anything beyond the organization’s mission statement. I, myself, like creative writing and art, why would I share the sentiment of disbanding the English department or think , “literature produces no testable results, so it’s useless”? It’s important to avoid sweeping generalizations of a demographic since those types of generalizations ignore individuality, and I suspect no one here wants their identity reduced to one aspect of their lives.

3/2/2011 and 3/16/2011 meetings

Sorry for the absence of meeting minutes on our blog here. I’ve been really busy this month with school. So here’s what happened on March 2nd: We introduced ourselves with our name, favorite adjective, and our favorite character from Tiwlight, discussed flyer designs for God’s Lady problem (which went very well as you can read about in one of the posts below). We also discussed having some new activities like creationist bingo, and charity fundraisers. Then we watched a few funny videos and delegated flyer distribution responsibilities.

On the 16th we were supposed to have a presentation from a representative of Camp Quest (a secular themed summer camp) but they did not turn up so we had a very fun discussion about our experiences with religious summer camps that lasted for most of the meeting.

God’s Lady Problem: Breaking Up with Abusive Supernatural Beings

By Joseph

Hey Everyone, I hope you had a good spring break! Now that things are back in full swing here, we like to focus our attention on our upcoming event of the month: “God’s Lady Problem: Breaking Up with Abusive Supernatural Beings“. The date is Tuesday, March 22 at 7:00 pm in the Cascade Room of Atwood Student Union and the speaker is Jen McCreight. She hosts the blog Blag Hag where she writes about skepticism, feminism, science, sex, and atheism. She’ll have a 30 minute Q&A session after the hour-long talk, so anyone with sweet sweet inquiries should express them freely! I’ve got several questions for Jen myself that need light shed on them for good measure, such as ”How has skepticism influenced your feminism?”, “What is it about religion that is appealing to women despite being intrinsically and obviously sexist toward them, even for those who claim to be feminists?” and “What plans do you have in the works for future activism?”. We hope all will go well for everyone and don’t be afraid to welcome Jen with open arms to SCSU, so see you there!

Enter Morality

By Joseph

Hello again. With spring break looming around the corner, we’ve got decisions, both good and bad, to decide on for our week of milk and honey. I figured, why not write about morality?

We all got a sense of this morality. It doesn’t matter what your background is or what religion (if any) you adhere to, every social being will abide by a code of ethics in their societies. It’s been debated countless times if morality is objective or relative. If say, morality is objective, then there is a moral system that can determine what is truly right or what is truly wrong, but if morality is relative, then there really is no right or wrong that any moral system can truly determine. Most believe that there is objective morality and have attributed it to divine word, but attributing it to that will not remove the relativism inherent from one moral system to another. This relates to Euthyphro’s dilemma (sometimes called Plato’s Dilemma). Here’s a variation of the dilemma, “Is an action morally right because god commands it or does god command an action because it is morally right”? I’ll leave you, the reader, to figure this one out. Sarah came across this video from God is not Good which is a scene of religous jews in Auchwitz discussing the actions of their god. In the scene, the one reciting passages from the Old Testament concluded that their god is a terrible being with no compassion for their suffering or anyone elses. This reminds of Epicurus’s quote:

“Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent

Is he able to prevent evil, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him god?

For those of you who believe in a god and are religious, you don’t need to believe or submit to a god to be moral. Having a sense of cooperation and respect for others will make you moral, no god required. Those who say you need to sumbit to their god to be moral are either misunderstanding morality or are out to convert you to their brand of belief for more converts. While atheism may not solve the problem of moral relativism, it is consistent in that there is no contract with deities whose commands determine right and wrong on their whim.

2/23/2011 Meeting

By Secretary Drew

Last night we had a great meeting. As always we began with introductions (Name/major/favorite kind of ice cream/prefered type of electricity, DC or AC). Then we watched a video of an interview done by The Young Turks with Jen McCreight about Boobquake and did some brainstorming to help Jen come up with a title for her talk in march (my favorite so far is “Out of the Kitchens, Out of the Churches, but there were a lot of other great ones). Some of our members who had attended the other night’s astronomy presentation (“2000 Years of Astronomical Discoveries” by Prof. David Williams) told the rest of us a bit about what went on. For the rest of the meeting we watched some interesting videos. The first one was the introduction for an episode of Horizon about what happened before the “Big Bang.” We watched a funny video called “The Saga of Biorn” about an old Viking looking for a worthy opponent so that he may die in battle and enter Valhalla. Neil deGrasse Tyson making fun of 2012 doomsdayers, Hitchens (“Hitchslap”), and a clip from The Atheist Experience. So, over all, it was a very laid back meeting punctuated with some good laughs. Hope to see you at the next one!

Seeing Familiar Faces.

By Joseph

I hope you enjoyed my first post about the conclusion I have reached so far. Now I will write about what I’m sure is a pet peeve of many who read this.

Here is the link to the story.

In a nutshell, a couple in Orange County saw the face of Jesus on their wooden rocking chair and hope it is a sign of good times just right around the corner, even though they have no idea what the sign is implying (it could mean the exact opposite: bad times are coming, because the lord is pissed off). For those thinking, “If Jesus wanted to get people to believe in him again, why leave an imprint of his face on a wooden chair where only a person could find it by a chance encounter and mistaken it for an number of things?” This is exactly what goes through my mind, and quite frankly, no one can really answer this. I say no one can answer this is because, well, when talking about mythical beings, there really is no right or wrong about their nature or their state of mind (apparently the faithful can make up the minds of their deities).

Moving on, anyone who has heard of this kind of news knows it isn’t really news at all. We all have seen a face at some time or another in otherwise purposeless patterns and it’s not all that surprising. There is a term for this and it’s called Pareidolia. Many don’t realize the folly of their perceptions and how their brains can fool themselves into thinking they saw something significant like a sign. There are many examples of this psychological phenomenon including the face of Mars, the Old Man on the Mountain, the Man on the Moon, Mr. MIMAL (can you guess which states I’m refering to?), and yes, the faces of messiahs like Jesus on toast or rocking chairs. They are all misconceptions of patterns that have no real value beyond the few who take them seriously. Like I said before, THIS IS NOT NEWS, but I suppose it was a slow news day for KTLA. They got to keep us entertained, right? Or maybe their perceptions fooled them too, who knows?

Generous readings!

2/16/2011 Meeting

By Secretary Drew

At last night’s meeting we got some feedback about how Darwin Week went. People said that they liked the both movies, and the fact that they were shown on Friday and Saturday. Someone recommended that next year we could co-sponsor an event with the biology department. It was mentioned that might we have advertised or promoted the events earlier we could have had a larger audience (meaning we would need a larger room since we were at capacity for the room in Carol Hall). Another suggestion was to have more visual aids (and more “Jesus Riding a Raptor” buttons). Other than that people said they enjoyed the coloring and that the raffle was a big crowd pleaser.

We also discussed scheduling a second weekly meeting for those of you who can’t make it to the Wednesday meetings and possible titles for Jen McCreight‘s talk (March 22nd, 7 PM in Atwood). Please send us an email at ssa@stcloudstate.edu if you have any input on what day/time to hold a second weekly meeting, and any suggestions for a title on Jen’s women/non-theism talk.

The articles discussed at the meeting were “Secularism’s Gift to the World” by Tom Flynn and “How Belief in Theistic Evolution is Nearly as Much of a Denial of Science as Creationism” by Dan Fincke.

The Conclusion

Hey there,

The name is Joseph and I am the blogger for the Secular Student Alliance at St. Cloud. This is my first blog post ever so I’m not quite certain how to start this out, but I will go with what I can work with.

I named this post “The Conclusion” because I have went from being a theist to deist, to agnostic, and finally, atheism. While I cannot tell you with absolute authority that god(s) does not exist, I’m fairly confident (about 99.9999987654321%) that they don’t, at least the ones that I have heard of. This is the resulting conclusion I lean toward because I haven’t been given a good reason to believe in the first place; sure there’s the holy scriptures of various religions out there and granted I haven’t read all of them, but simply reading them is not enough. Being a physics major, I expect physical evidence of these deities (unfortunately, not all physics majors require this of their religious beliefs) and observations that directly lead to the conclusion that their god must exist for all of this to work out. Scientific discoveries have shown us so far that even one supreme being is not necessary for the existence of our reality and we are understanding it better and better than previous generations. This is part of the reason why I am an atheist; I haven’t seen any concrete evidence of any gods, the supernatural, or even the paranormal (i’ll cover this in the future). So there you have it. If you have such evidence on hold, please produce the goods and I’ll be happy to critique it to the best of my abilities and I might believe again.

I hope you moderately enjoyed my first post. I’ll work more content into future posts when I get the chance.

No regrets,