Richmond Area Free Thinkers Society

August Berkshire, Vice President of Atheist Alliance International, is going on tour and he’s making a stop here in Richmond to meet with RAFTS!

We have reserved a conference room at Fifth Street Bagel to gather and chat. The discussion will be mostly informal, but he will be available to answer questions about AAI, if anyone is interested.

Both non-believers *AND* believers (and everything in between) are encouraged to attend — he is very cordial and friendly, and all are welcome to join.

August Berkshire has been an atheist activist for 25 years and is currently vice president of Atheist Alliance International, having served in that role for most of the past decade.  He often speaks on atheism to the media and at public high schools, community colleges, and Christian colleges.  His specialty is explaining atheism to the general public.

August co-founded the Twin Cities Chapter of American Atheists in 1984 and served as its president for four years.  The group became Minnesota Atheists in 1991 and August also served as its president for four years.  He helped start the Minnesota Atheists’ cable TV and radio programs and is a past editor of the Minnesota Atheists newsletter.

August also serves on the board of directors of Camp Quest of Minnesota and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and in the past has served on the board of directors of the Humanists of Minnesota.

For the past six years, August has had the “ATHEIST” car license plate for Minnesota (pictured above).  He is proud to be listed in the reference book Who’s Who in Hell.

Back from vacation!

We’ve taken the past few months off since schedule availability was so sparse, but with fall approaching, let’s get back into the swing of things!

If you check out the calendar on the left, you’ll see that a meeting date has been selected for all remaining months in 2008. (You can click on those dates in the calendar to see more details about the meeting for that day) The dates are:

• August 16
• September 13
• October 11
• November 15
• December 13

Locations are to be decided, and all times are set to “11 am to 1 pm” unless someone chooses otherwise. That always seemed to be the best consistent attendance. It, as well as the location, is negotiable to maximize attendance.

Our next meeting, August 16, will be at Fifth Street Bagel, 11a-1p. Be there!

My son and I watch the television show “Arthur“. It’s based on the series of storybooks by Marc Brown, and is shown in the mornings on PBS. It’s pretty good, as far as kids shows go. It teaches some good morals and emphasizes compassion and understanding, both good traits for people of any age.

On Friday the 13th, though, they showed an episode regarding Superstition. In this episode, the science nerd “Brain” (that’s his name) devises an experiment to conclusively show that superstition is bunk. He does so by walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror, stepping on sidewalk cracks, etc. The usual drills. So good so far. (Read More »)

Ever hear of a Rorschach test? Developed by Hermann Rorschach in the 1920’s, the inkblot is a commonly used tool for forensic assessment by Psychologists. While it is commonly thought that a Rorschach analysis is done by interpreting and psychoanalyzing what the patient sees in the inkblot (”Since you saw your dead mother, that means you have unresolved maternal issues”), they are more commonly analyzed with the Exner method: the responses of the patient are compared to a large statistical body of responses and a profile is created based on which personality types most fit the response. (”45% of the people that saw a crow also suffer from clinical depression. 60% of people who saw a bicycle are schizophrenics.” etc.) The interpretation is correlative, rather than directly interpretive.

Rorschach’s function based on some trickery of our brains known as pareidolia.Pareidolia is essentially when we perceive a random or vague visual/audio stimulus as being significant, when in fact it is not. (Read More »)

SERIES PREMIERE!
EVOLVE:
EYES

Eyes are one of evolution’s most useful and prevalent inventions, equipping approximately 95 percent of living species. They exist in many different forms across nature, having evolved convergently across different species. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. In the pre-Cambrian era, insects, in particular the dragonfly, would take the compound eye to new heights. Find out how dinosaurs adapted their eyes to become such successful hunters of prey. And while dinosaurs remained at the top of the food chain for 150 million years, tiny early mammals developed night vision to populate the night as a survival technique. Finally, learn how primates underwent several adaptations to their eyes to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.
(Read More »)

Certain athletes are notorious for having certain routines or rituals they do because it’s “lucky”. Some people believe that “psychics” like Sylvia Browne can speak with the dead. Others still believe that eating immediately before swimming is dangerous, even life-threatening.

The common thread between all of these things is irrationality – a bizarre glitch in the part of our brains that processes reality into the stuff of thoughts. For the purposes of this post, we’re using the definition of “irrationality” that means something that lacks “a sufficient ground of explanation or of logical defense.” In other words, it’s something we believe in spite of there being any sufficient explanation for it.

But what does that even mean? (Read More »)

The other day I was browsing Kerasotes’ website and I noticed that the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” was featured prominently in the “Coming Soon” section, receiving billing above even the next Chronicles of Narnia movie.

This was hardly the first exposure to this movie that I have had. I’ve been following it’s progress through other blogs and websites for a while now. But it suddenly made it a lot more real, and close to home. Would we really be getting Expelled shown here in Richmond?

The synopsis of the movie is this: Intelligent Design is the position that everything we see around us in the natural world must have been the product, at some level, by an unidentified supernatural designer, and that traditional solely-naturalistic explanations are insufficient to explain the complexity we see around us. Those individuals who support Intelligent Design are constantly being suppressed by the proponents of “Darwinism” (Stein’s word for “Evolution / Naturalistic worldview”). Darwinism is also “necessary, but not sufficient,” in the words of David Berlinski, for the horrible atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.

But of course, this movie really isn’t a documentary so much as a propaganda film. With recent reviews done by Michael Shermer & John Rennie of Scientific American, and a very fresh Copyright Infringement lawsuit pending, the contents of the movie are almost moot compared to the details surrounding it. (Read More »)