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By Neece
 EDIT!  We are meeting March 20 at 2pm at Joe and David’s Farm to celebrate the Spring Equinox with a Potluck dinner. We will also finish up The God Virus.
- Potluck Dinner
- BYO Beverages
- We’ll talk and vote on our Secular Service endeavor
- We’ll finish up The God Virus
- Merriment will ensue!
NOTE: This is INSTEAD OF meeting March 21. We are now meeting the day before. Any questions, email Neece.
I forgot to bring up the subject of our Secular Service in our regular meeting! So we’ll spend a few minutes when we get together for this meeting, gathering ideas and then getting a tally on which service we’re all most interested in. So bring your ideas or comment here with suggestions if you can’t make the meeting.
Directions Below.
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We had so much discussion for The…
By Neece
 Last night Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) filed a D.C. voucher amendment to the second jobs bill under consideration by the Senate. The D.C. voucher program uses taxpayer funds to pay for parents to send their children to private religious schools. The program is called the “D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program,” but a 2007 government report found that these vouchers do not give D.C. students seeking a private school education sufficient secular choices, forcing them to attend religious schools or remain in the failing public school system.
By design, voucher programs aid struggling Christian schools. A July 2009 report by Rutgers University on the D.C. voucher program concluded that the way the voucher program is structured “essentially push[es] students into Christian Association and Catholic schools, pricing out independent (non-religious) schools and Hebrew schools.”
By continuing this program, those of us who do not wish to subsidize someone else’s church will…
By Neece
Gerald found this interesting chart chock full of information. Of course, remember correlation does not necessitate causation, but it is striking how the numbers fall.
 Links on the full page >>
By Neece
 We are meeting at the Blue Moose at 5 pm on Sunday, March 28.
We are spending the first 15 minutes or so on a Vietnamese religion called the Cao Dai. Jim will be sharing that with us as he spent a bit of time there recently.
After that, we’ll talk about Irish Folklore. So bring along some information on that.
By Neece
 We met February 21 at 5pm at the Blue Moose.
~Update: We had so much discussion, both about the book and off-topic, that we only got through chapter 5. So we’ll finish the book at our next meeting.
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The book we are reading (in its entirety) is The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture by Darrel W. Ray
We’ll each take a chapter or two to share with everyone. There are 12 in all. Leave a comment below or email Neece with which chapters you’d like to cover:
- 1. Religion is a Virus: Joe
- 2. How Religions Survive and Dominate: Joe
- 3. American Civil Religion: Gerald
- 4. God Loves You – The Guilt that Binds: David
- 5. Sex and the God Virus: Brent
- 6. The Myth of Unchanging Morality: Daniel
- 7. Jesus My Personal Savior: The Roots of American
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By Neece
 We are meeting February 28 at 5pm at the Blue Moose.
Our Religion of the Month is Judaism. Aaron will be talking to us all about the religion. Please comment below or email questions in so I can get them to him, so he knows what to talk about.
~Update:
Aaron answered all of our Judaism questions about everything we could think of. It was very interesting. We had a good turnout! Some of us went out to dinner afterward for even more interesting conversation.
~
By Neece
I found this 2 part video Richard Dawkins did for the BBC in 2006. It’s a very good overview of his ideas and concepts of religion, evolution and atheism. See below for the descriptions of each episode.
I thought this would be good to see more of what the “religion is a virus” concept was all about, right from Dawkins, since we’re reading The God Virus this month for the book club.
The Root of All Evil? Part 1: The God Delusion. (Richard Dawkins, 2006) – 47:51
The Root of All Evil? – The Virus of Faith (2 of 2) – 47:58
Here’s a description of the first episode:
By Neece
 Brent found another treat for those of us reading The God Virus. Darrel Ray, the author of the book, was interviewed by D.J Grothe on Point of Inquiry a few months ago. You can listen to the podcast either on the page here, or through iTunes.
Here’s what the site says about the interview:
Dr. Darrel W. Ray is author of three books, two on organizational psychology. He has been a psychologist for over 30 years. After practicing counseling and clinical psychology for 10 years, his focus shifted to organizational psychology and consulting. A longtime student of religion, his latest book is The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture.
In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Darrel Ray talks about religion being like a virus, elaborating on Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme. He explains why the metaphor of God belief…
By Neece
 This will be our first ever Religion of the Month Club.
We met at 5pm on January 31, at the Blue Moose.
~EDIT 3:
13 people showed up for our meeting! How prophetic! It was very interesting to learn about the Hittittes, the Lithuanian pagans, the American Indians, the Norse religion and the Ancient Greeks.
Thanks for showing up and making our first ever Religion of the Month Club successful!:)
~
~ EDIT 2:
Butch and I (Neece) were talking about our research for this meeting and came up with some possible questions that we all might ask of each of these religions:
- The time of the religion’s dominance and greatest influence?
- What was the impact on society at the time?
- What is the lasting impact of the religion?
- How did it influence the religions of today?
- When and why did they become myths instead of religions? When did
…
By Neece
 We are reading The God Virus for the book club in February. On page 18, Darrel W. Ray describes an experiment. I think I’ve heard of it before, but I thought I’d share it with you because it shows how religion attacks the critical thinking skills of the mind. As Mr. Ray says, it leaves the skill intact for other religions but disables critical thinking about one’s own religion. It really is like a virus of the mind.
Here’s the experiment as explained in the book:
You have a serious conversation with a deeply christian friend. Your friend is intelligent, well educated and knowledgeable. You agree to record the session. The topic is islam. During the session, you discuss that mohammed was a self-appointed prophet and that he claimed he talked to allah and the angels. He wrote a book that he claimed was infallible, and he flew from
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