So I get it — FGC is like a bigger version of yearly meeting.

I had the pleasure of meeting Chris M. of Quaker blogging fame for the first time, as well as Karen Street. Chris has a list of other bloggers here, though Micah Bales is the only other one on the list I’ve talked to. (I’ve also seen Kody, and will probably see Staśa this afternoon. Update: Also ran into Peterson the day after his plenary performance, and had the pleasure of meeting Robin, Liz, and Jeanne.)

Nontheist Friends events, including my and Robin Alpern’s interest group “Theist and Nontheist Friends in Conversation,” are going very well — attendance is significantly up from last year, they tell me, and the energy is very clear.

In addition to our previously scheduled events, this afternoon there’s one billed as “The Great Theist-Nontheist Conversational Smackdown of 2008″ between Chuck Fager and David Boulton, which I will try to record and post here. (Apparently it was a last-minute idea of Chuck’s.)

OK, not ten years, but the Humanist Small Group had its tenth meeting today, again at Andala in Cambridge near Central. Breaking from past tradition (appropriately no doubt), we read a text in advance — Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism — and mostly talked about the issues it raised: freedom of choice vs. determinism, morality without God, and whether human beings have an essence.

Towards the end one of the new participants “came out” as a Christian, which was nice, during a stretch of discussion of whether a religious person can fully experience ethical quandaries if they are distracted by irrelevant considerations from sacred texts or theology. Even before that revelation, there seemed to be general agreement that religious people would be welcome to come to our meetings if they were interested.

The group is hoping to expand, although if it becomes much larger it may need to divide to retain its “Small” and intimate character. The facilitator just launched a blog to publicize the group’s activities at humanistsoffline.org; if you’re interested in coming, stay tuned there, though it likely will be on July 13 at 12:30 at Andala again.

(While we’re on websites, group members also post about general humanist topics at humanismonline.org. I might start doing so there soon.)

A point about the reading under the cut: I was surprised how many people took Sartre to task for saying human beings did not have an essence. (More »)

This month’s Best Person in the World is Richard Lenski, a biologist at Michigan State University.

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The interest group on nontheistic Quakerism I facilitated at the aforementioned young adult Quaker conference went rather well – a report may be coming on the Nontheist Friends website. (I posted one to the email list, but would want to edit it down a bit.)

Both the interest group and the conference generally changed something for me, and I find a new sense of commitment to the Quaker experiment.

I first started attending Quaker meetings back in 2002 at North Shore Friends Meeting in Beverly, Mass., and officially became a member a few years later. I’ve been living in the city for two years now, and in the past few weeks finally decided I really really felt right about transferring membership to Friends Meeting at Cambridge. I just sent North Shore a long letter of transfer, which is found under the cut.

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How do nonreligious people identify themselves? Most religious surveys don’t look very closely at the nonreligious — the last Pew survey didn’t include the term “humanist,” for example. Personally, I like humanist, atheist or “nothing”, depending on the context.

So it’s good that a non-religious identification survey is being conducted by Dr. Luke Galen of Grand Valley State University. It aims to be

the first ever rigorous survey instrument designed specifically to gather demographic and attitudinal information exclusively about America’s non-religious community. Past surveys have been based on religious individuals, with the non-religious being little more than an afterthought. Professor Galen will begin data analysis soon, and later in 2008, he will give [Center for Inquiry Michigan] a special presentation to us on the results of the survey.

I got an invite through CFI and posted it somewhere for others, before realizing it was a unique URL meant for a single participant. (Oops.) The invite suggested the participant pool is restricted to members of atheist/etc. organizations (including members of their email lists, apparently), but if you really want to take it, try emailing survey@cfimichigan.org.

I made the following video – the Sex in the City trailer with an awesomely weird Japanese band as soundtrack – as a joke for my girlfriend, whose friend broke into her Facebook profile and filled it with Sex in the City references. (She detested the movie.) It syncs up surprisingly well, especially after 0:45 and 2:10, so I am posting it here for general consumption.

The track is “Refusal fossil” by Ruins.

Ddoom-tchak!

What I know for sure is that this week, there will be a gallery opening at the peerless (in Cambridge at least) Broadway Bike School featuring art by two of the bike mechanics, around 8 pm. Wine and cheese will reportedly be on hand.

What I don’t know is what day. My friend who is friends with people there says it’s Wednesday, and this blog says it’s Thursday. So to be on the safe side you should come tomorrow, and the worst thing that will happen is you’ll have to buy a patch kit or something to not feel like a jerk. And then come back the next day.

Update: Thursday.

Here comes one of the first movies to take full advantage of the new cultural interest in atheism and irreligion – Bill Maher is releasing a film called Religulous, in theaters October 3. Trailer:

(Higher-res version)

I imagine it will have a positive effect on balance, and be mostly accurate, but I’m expecting it to be at least a little unfair. In a Larry King appearance last year he praised Michael Moore, and the trailer highlights the unremarkable fact that it’s being produced by the same studio as Fahrenheit 9/11 (unremarkable because Lionsgate has done 60+ other films since then).

I want to futz with my Pipes, but last time I tried I couldn’t find anything terribly user friendly, and ended up resorting to guess-and-check.

The Arab world has been shocked by Obama’s speech to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee yesterday. What shocked them (and surprised me) is apparently the ending claim from this key paragraph: (More »)