Skeptics at Starbucks.
Freethinkers in a meeting have a weird sense of humor. Though we had a little serious business to undertake in our meeting last Sunday, there were a few lines that were bound to get the group giggling.
“I think we should start with a prayer.” Snort, giggle.
“I called you here today to talk about Jesus.” Snicker, snicker.
We didn’t start with a prayer and we didn’t preach - in fact we moderated our voices when a particularly old and religious-looking person would happen to pass by, which happened about three times.
We were there, sitting in a Starbucks on the top floor of Shangri-La Plaza, on the invitation of Red, to meet and to figure out if we had enough in common to create a more lasting fellowship.
We spent the majority of the time explaining our individual beginnings as freethinkers, by way of introducing ourselves. (there were 26 of us, after all, and we only had three hours for the meeting.)
Three of us - Benj, Patrick, and myself - had first “met” online as the resident atheists at PinoyExchange.com. Most of us were born Catholic; one was an ex-pastor; one had just resigned a teaching job at a Catholic school; a few had spent some time studying (then rejecting) Communism; more than a few were born to parents of different religions, whose conflicts planted the seeds for doubt.
So what were we doing there? What did we have in common?
We invoked Teen Atheist as our muse, and wondered where she could be.
A lot of us are happy with coexisting with religion, instead of subverting it 100%. We’re citizens in a Catholic-majority country, we have religious family members. For many of us, we’re happy to be rational in an irrational community, and we’re happy to keep it to ourselves in daily life.
Some of us aren’t happy with the way rational voices are sidelined in Philippine society, in favor of Catholicism, magic, and superstition. Nobody thinks anything of Catholic bishops throwing their weight around in politics. “The Secret” and the “Third Eye” are accepted as Gospel truth. Bullshit reigns supreme, because the alternative gets almost no notice.
Some of us want to get together to form a new group… but Arnold provided a welcome dose of reason. Before we get together as an organization, he asked, why not define what we have in common first? If we try to make big plans without defining our commonalities, wouldn’t we run the risk of ending up like so many Filipino freethinking societies before us - rent apart by our differences and forgotten?
We intentionally left some things unresolved… so much the better, to talk about in our next meeting.
Stay tuned.
Did you get a copy of the DVD Red is passing around? I hear it has the (in)famous Zeitgeist movie in it. I told him I’m very skeptical of the ideas presented in the show. He said there were other great stuff in the DVD and just skip the ones I don’t like.
BTW, nice meeting you there.
Nice post, Mike
Danny, what DVD are you talking about? You mean the one with my royalty-free home movies and pictures of relatives and friends, right? 
who’s neda? what’s her blog URL
AKA the only person there to ever meet Teen Atheist. :p
she actually told me that she has only revealed her online identity to me.
By the way, have deleted the attendance sheet from my Flickr stream. Thanks for the reminder, Danny boy!
Teen Atheist stupidly thought the meeting was NEXT Sunday instead of this one. D’oh!
From Teen Atheist:
“Muse”? Haha now I’m really scared to meet you guys. Pare tell them Teen Atheist can’t make it to the next meeting because of a teambuilding activity at work.
TEEHEE
Tell Teen Atheist to come incognito. I don’t want to ruin the surprise either. I’m like Commissioner Gordon that way - throwing away the chance to look under Batman’s mask to keep the mystery going.
As much as she WANTS to come incognito, Teen Atheist really CAN’T. She’d stick out like a sore thumb.
^ Bakit? Mukhang bata pa naman tayo ah. :))
akosigundam: why? does she have her blog url tattooed on her face or something? Now that’s commitment!
The lesson is this:
If you want to be a free thinker, deny, deny, deny! Affirm, affirm, affirm! Am I unclear? Yes I am. Because being an atheist/agnostic/freethinker == idiots, does not necessarily mean that you are free. You dolts!
Thanks, ignoreme, I had a good laugh at that one. I ought to thank you, too, for giving me the first chance in a long time to use the Douchebag plugin.
“Trying to be Europeans” - what, and Catholicism is, er, uniquely Asian? Leaving aside your clumsy semantic attack on “freethinkers”, your insult-laden screed just underscores exactly what it is about religion that we have decided to leave behind.
Danny considered himself a point and laugh atheist. Now we know exactly who he’s pointing at when he laughs.
“Leaving aside your clumsy semantic attack on “freethinkers”, your insult-laden screed just underscores exactly what it is about religion that we have decided to leave behind.”
Ha. Are you implying that I am “religious”? Religious from what you interpret as “religious”? My remark was bathed with insults because for two centuries now these “freethinkers” can’t just die. Bertrand Russell was a fool - I bet he is your “god.” Ah. Intellectual cleanliness - I call that your intellectual nonsense! Reason, reason, reason! What about instinct? You can ask Socrates about this - what was his answer? Though not so explicitly, instinct and not reason!
“Danny considered himself a point and laugh atheist. Now we know exactly who he’s pointing at when he laughs.”
What is that all about?
Ok. I want to help you. Perhaps you can read this:
http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/diefrohl7f.htm
the section “How we, too, are still pious”. Or perhaps the whole treatise itself, if you love your intellect that much.
You still believe in Truth and that does not make you any different with pious, sacred - and consequently, numbed - men! You hypocrite! Stop believing in truth. Do not believe at all - if you achieve that, I will adore you - you will be my new God. You will be a God.
Ok. If you want, demonstrate it to me - perhaps with the full aide of your sick herd - why this is not so; show it it to me that the claim that “freethinkers worship Truth, ‘the real thing’, certainty” is false and inapplicable to you. Unless you do so, you have not shown you true ilk, your true “thinking.” But you cannot do that - because you are what you are! You will end up in circles - what is needed is to constantly reinterpret that “vicious circle”. But alas, you and your herd abominates the idea by promoting “freethinking” What a helpless play is this!
Oohh, so that is what has your panties in a twist! You believe that we believe in a capital-T Truth!
I don’t know if any of the guys in the gathering would agree with that. I certainly don’t. I’m too aware of our human shortcomings to assume that we have any claim to “Truth”. What we do have is an understanding of the evidence, which only points to an indifferent Universe and the flawed conclusions of many established religions. I personally believe the Universe is asymptotically knowable through science and reason, but there will always be something we don’t know.
I never said otherwise. Nobody did. So what are you ranting at? Maybe you should have stopped to check whether we believe what you claim we believe before unleashing your deluded accusations.
Yeah, buddy, you got the wrong number. I figure you forgot to take your pills and you had to take it out on someone.
“It really is amusing why you are not being skeptical at being a “skeptic”.”
It really is amusing to watch you grasp for something to disparage us with. Not very well-played, but I give you an A for effort.
And I will take a page from my high school social science teacher’s playbook.
So, ignoreme, what do you propose?
@missingpoints
“And I will take a page from my high school social science teacher’s playbook”
What is that all about? Kindly explain.
“o, ignoreme, what do you propose?”
Simple. Revise you banner. “Freethinkers” is misleading. First, to me, if you are unable to think, as a wild animal in a forest, then your indeed free. It is because that man can think, that makes “absolute freedom” laughable. So you see, revise it. “Free thinking” is an impossibility. One need not be a logician to realise this - one only needs cunning.
“Absolute freedom”? And pray tell, where did we ever say our beliefs were “absolute”? I get it - you’re reacting to your own preconceptions of our beliefs, not the beliefs as we’ve expressed them here. No wonder we’re talking at cross-purposes!
Until you get it into your numb skull that there is nothing absolute about our beliefs, then this discussion is going nowhere. Into the moderation hole with you.
So… You make up your own definition of “freethinking” and expect us to follow it?
@missingpoints
I never “make up” my “own” definition of freethinking. In fact, I was faithful to the European tradition; the critique which I presented was not original; it was presented some centuries before; and yet, your lack of historical consciousness prevents you from realizing this crucial point. And precisely because of that lack, you and your friends hastily “launched” this out-moded and impossible mode of thinking.
In the first place, What is your conception of “freethinking”? Is it so original that the critique of Hegel and post-modernism are irrelevant to the German Enlightenment? What is the difference between these so called “Filipino Freethinkers” and the Enlightenment? If there is none, then, as a Filipino, I am ashamed of this; it merely suggests that Filipinos are ignorant to the events of European intellectualism; in any case, this (the attempt on a “filipino free thinker”) is a feeble on an “Enlightenment”, which was out-dated a century ago.AFAIK, you have not elaborated your “definition” of “freethinking”. The arrogance and presumptuousness of your friend here is laughable to the extent that I was rude. However, I had forgiven him, and hopes that I am too.
Really? Is that all you’ve got? Arguing the semantics of “freethinking” and saying we’re somehow deficient because we don’t follow some yet-defined-by-you dogma of what a freethinker is?
That’s BULLSHIT, and you know it. We’re not blind followers of the Enlightenment - we’ve simply appropriated the process of skepticism and logic in opposition to religious and magical thinking, and we’re content to call that “freethought”.
You have a problem with that, take it up with the Freedom from Religion Foundation: “A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.”
You know why we don’t take you seriously? You know why we’re just laughing at you (and imagining you probably have no life, plus a small penis besides)? Because here you are, insisting that ONLY a certain mode of thinking that aligns with the 19th century Enlightenment philosophers qualifies as freethought, and insisting with growing vehemence even as you’re wrong.
Not only are you VERY wrong, WE DON’T GIVE A SHIT whether you’re right or wrong. Because there’s no instruction manual to freethinking, no dogma to it! The sheer ridiculousness of your extended complaints increases as you contrast it with the simple stuff that brought us together in the first place.
We’re skeptical of institutional religion, while some of us aren’t necessarily hostile to it. We’re passionate about reason and science, and we feel there isn’t enough of it in the public sphere. Some of us are schooled in philosophy, some of us aren’t.
WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU to say that this is, somehow, NOT free thought, NOT a legitimate thinking process, NOT somehow valid in this day and age? Really, who died and made you the fucking Czar of Enlightenment Philosophy that you can judge our informal get-together and find it deficient by means of semantics?
You’re obviously schooled in philosophy, but I suggest you’ve somehow overdone it - your legalistic yammering makes it very obvious. Here’s my suggestion: just take your thick philosophy book and stick it up your ass, where it belongs, because apparently you’ve been talking out of your backside these past few days.
P.S. I’m also aware I’ve opened myself up to accusations of philosophical illiteracy, but I don’t give a shit.
I’d rather be a philosophical illiterate than a fucking pedant.
Ya know, a lot of things have happened since the enlightenment. You might want to read up on that.
Sniff sniff… I smell a post-modernist.
@danny
I don’t know who that statement is for; but it doesn’t matter anyway.
Consider these two statements:
I am a catholic
and
I am a freethinker/post-modernist.
There is no logical difference between the two persons uttering one of those remark. They are both predicated, hence, they are both the same, i.e, a catholic and a freethinker/atheist are both the same in the sense above; one cannot escape this. If he/she decides to escape this, that will be a contradiction. Suppose this statement:
I am free
It is a contradiction, I say. How could you be free and at the same time predicated/determined-by-a characteristic?
The statement, “I am a freethinker” is not immune to this interpretation either. Contradiction arises.
The real issue is whether we will be indifferent to this contradiction. If we are indifferent, then, and only then, we have no right at all to the contradiction which others involve themselves with (namely, catholics, theists, or whoever possesses an “unscientific” belief). It will be shameful if we preach rationalism (detesting contradiction) while we ourselves are in a contradiction.
Hmmmm…. He’s stringing words together but they don’t make sense. Could this be what “freethinking” is for him?
I appreciate that he’s a bit more polite now, but now he strikes me as someone who took a hard hit to the head with a philosophy book.
Still pedantic, dude, and still ignoring the fact that our self-definition as “freethinkers” isn’t predicated on an absolutely rational universe. We’re satisfied with defining our freethinking as relative; we’re freethinkers relative to an irrational religious world, and our thinking processes are free relative to those still bound by religious strictures.
We’re not as “free” as psychopaths, who are not bound by conscience. AFAIK, we have intact consciences, and are bound to respect life and happiness in the people we meet. Because of that limitation, are we then “unfree”? Bullshit, only a pedant would argue that way.
Look, ignoreme, you obviously have a lot to say and we obviously aren’t rising to your bait. Why don’t you GYOFB and rant there all you like without fear of moderation?
I am interested however what ‘freethinking’ is for ‘missingpoints’. If you read through his remarks, one could say “he has something to say, but opted not to.” Hmm.. I am interested as to his “ideas”.
Nah, he probably just recognizes that you are a past master of the subtle art of word salad. I suggest you look it up!
Or: He can’t understand at all; why?
Either because
1.) He just can’t (natural limitations of his intellect)
2.) He chose not to (out of a peculiar stubborness and arrogance, which does not want to hear and understand dissenting opinions; likewise, past ideas which were already thought-up by brilliant men)
3.) Both.
I reckon, that is the case for you too? Most likely.
Yawn. You can’t get your point across, so you resort to puerile aspersions on other people’s intellect. QED.
Point of fact: 1) you have no point whatsoever, apart from some hollow semantic objections to the use of the word “freethought” and a penchant for conflating belief and faith. That much was obvious from post 3 or 4 - the fact that I’ve let you comment thus far was an indulgence that went on probably far too long.
2) you appear to be some philosophy nerd who seeks validation for your thoughts by indulging in overlong exposition of your long-winded belief systems, and hopes that all that verbiage will be enough to mask the fact that you have no point (see #1), and the fact that your belief in … whatever … has not done much to add meaning to your life in any way.
So like I said before… GYOFB. That stands for Get Your Own Fucking Blog, in case you were too lazy to look it up. Feel free to bloviate there as long as you like, because I’m tired of indulging you. Any future comments from you shall be deleted without prejudice.