Humanist Small Group turns 10
Sunday, June 29th, 2008OK, 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…)
Tags: Cambridge, Harvard, humanism, Humanist Small Group, IRL