By Charity Campbell
The Minnesota Atheists November meeting featured small-group discussions on topics such as dealing with religious relatives, death and dying, and morality.
Read more: Small Group Discussion Format Generates Ideas in November
At our January meeting, Minnesota Atheists will be revisiting the issue of Minnesota’s law on marriage celebrants, which August Berkshire discussed briefly at our September meeting and at length in the October issue of The Minnesota Atheist. Since then, we have met with Minnesota state senator John Marty and have requested further feedback from our community on this issue.
At the January meeting, August will report on our talk with Senator Marty, and Stephanie Zvan will present preliminary results from our feedback survey and discuss the various options for action presented under the survey. If you haven’t shared your opinions with us yet, please take a few minutes to complete our survey.
.Read more: Marriage Celebrants Law to be Topic at January Meeting
By August Berkshire
On October 20, 2013, I debated Rev. Scott McMurray on the topic of “Can We Be Good without God?” at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse. The debate was sponsored by the La Crosse Secular Student Society and the La Crosse Area Freethought Society.
Following is my fifteen-minute opening statement. As I always do in debates like this, I open with a “prebuttal.” I argue what is wrong with the religious point of view before I say what’s better about the atheist point of view. I do this for three reasons:
First, in rebuttals a person is only supposed to address what the other person raised in their opening statement. There are often anti-religion points I want to make but I can’t count on my opponent raising these issues in their opening statements, so I do so myself in my opening statement. Second, the default in this country is religious belief, so if I can discredit religion right away it should make people more open to the atheist viewpoint, if only out of curiosity. Third, I like to put my opponent on the defensive right away. On to my opening statement:
We are all concerned with morality. Without it, we might not even be here. And I understand the fears of some religious people that, without a god to create or enforce morality, we would degenerate into a lawless species, torturing and murdering each other with nothing to hold us back. But we don’t get our morality from the gods, we create it ourselves, and then ascribe it to the gods as sort of an invisible policeman. But the thing is, you don’t need the gods to justify good behavior, you only need the gods to justify bad behavior.
.Read more: Opening Statement from "Can we be Good without God" Debate
By George Kane
I’m scared. I’m really scared. I’m afraid that when the Supreme Court decides Town of Greece v. Galloway this term, it will overturn the endorsement standard of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, leaving nothing of the wall of separation between church and state but scattered rubble.
Read more: News and Notes: SCOTUS could Eviscerate Establishment Clause
By Charles Coventry
As part of my third holiday to Stillwater, Minnesota, to visit my friend Ken Moses, we attended the Minnesota Atheists conference this past August.
At the conference, my Humanist Society of Scotland T-shirt aroused interest because of our motto “We’re A’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns.” This is an old proverb meaning that everybody is the same. Supposedly in a certain village the entire population had been fathered by Jock Tamson, the blacksmith.
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