I'm currently the president of UW-Madison's student org for infidels,
Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at UW-Madison. I've decided to start writing up reports on events we've done for anyone who's interested: for people who want to know what's going on with atheism among young people, for students looking at doing the same who want to know what a well-run (or at least semi-competently run) student org looks like, or for anyone with a general interest in the kinds of things that get said at the kind of events we do.
Our most recent event--this Tuesday--was based around the PBS documentary
The Question of God. The idea came out of the first meeting of the semester when I asked for proposals and a girl who had just joined mentioned she had a couple movies that could make for good fodder for discussion. The thing was four hours, so we picked out six clips totalling a little under an hour, to be followed by small group discussion, a format partially copied from another series of events that had been taking place on campus under the heading "Global Dialogue."
I was a little apprehensive about everything going right--would Central Reservations give us a decent room? Would the right number of people show up, enough to call the event a sucess but not more than we could handle? And related to the second question, would the fliers I handed to the Residence Life Office actually get put up? In the end, it went well: fliers went up, although a little on the late side, the room we got had chairs that were comfortable, though not re-arrangable for discussion, and ~35 people showed up, roughly what I had been counting on.
The six clips were all of conversations of modern people on various sub-topics of religion, numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, and 9 if you go to the transcripts on the website. I'm not sure how they selected the participants. One was Michael Shermer of
Skeptic magazine, we does fairly regularly deal with religious matters, though the rest were all over the map: a lawyer, a Jungian analyst, a psychiatrist, and so on.
There were three spots in particular I remember getting a reaction from the audience, namely roaring laughter:
Michael Shermer: One question. What is the origin of the moral sentiments? So, they evolved through natural forces and culture and history, or God implemented — put them in... ?
Margaret Klenck (Jungian, religious beliefs!?!?): Why can't it be both?
Michael Shermer: How can it be both?
Margaret Klenck: How can it not be both?
....
Armand Nicholi: How do you equate an omnipotent, all loving being with what we've come to expect and experience in our lives? How do we cope with the problem of suffering?
Frederick Lee [psychiatrist, Evangelical Christian]: There is no reconciliation. I think the definitive explanation, as far as from the spiritual worldview, is what was said in the book of Job, and this is a book that I cannot understand, and there is no answer to it. There is a wager —
Michael Shermer: But God's a sadist in that —
Frederick Lee: Exactly. There is a wager between God and the devil ...
Margaret Klenck: But we're back into dualism.
Frederick Lee: And the wager is Job only obeys you because you've blessed him, and God says, "Fine, torture him devil, do everything, but you can't kill him." And so he's tortured to the extreme, loses all his children, wealth, gets boils, and at the very end, you know, when his wife is telling him, "Curse God and die," he says, "No, I will remain faithful." Okay, but he still wants an account from God — "Why are you doing this to me? I have not been sinful. I have not committed anything that deserves this."
Jeremy Fraiberg: So why do you believe?
Frederick Lee: Because, as Lewis says, the problem of pain is only a problem because one believes in the spiritual worldview. In other words, faith creates the problem of pain.
Michael Shermer: Right. So just get rid of the faith, and that's it. There is no God.
Frederick Lee: Then there's no problem.
[And then the part the transcript leaves out for some reason] Michael Shermer: You should be an atheist. You'd be good at it.
....
Jeremy Fraiberg: We haven't spoken much about hell here, which I think is actually an obstacle of faith for some people. That is, if God is all good, and all powerful, forget the fact that bad things happen to good people, but what about people like Michael and me who have been struggling with these questions? It would seem kind of unfair if we had to suffer for eternity because we didn't believe after doing the best we could living according to our lights. I find that a very troubling concept.
Frederick Lee: I find it terribly troubling.
Jeremy Fraiberg: But you believe in it.
This is maybe funnier if you see their expressions, see them slowly enunciating their views. There was an apparently enthusiastic arm pump after the "How can it not be both" comment, but I later learned it was a sarcastic-enthusiastic arm pump.
The small group I ended up in consisted of two lapsed Catholics and one guy I'd known since freshmen year who, I found out that evening, still considered himself a serious Catholic. However, his citations of the catchechism (sp?) were, in each case, immediately followed by what was wrong with Catholic doctrine on the point in question.
I don't know everthing that went on in the other discussions, though I know people thought they went well, so I consider the event a sucess.
Oh, but one thing: one of the groups decided there wasn't enough space in the room for all of us, so, without my realizing it, went to another room to discuss. That resulted in one girl frantically looking for her boyfriend at the end. To anyone who's planning on trying to do an event like this, try to avoid having that happen at your event.