Who: Northwest Freethought Coalition
What: Annual Solstice celebration
Where: University Unitarian Church (map)
When: Sunday, December 9, 2007 5:00-9:00PM
“Join us for a festive evening and get acquainted with other freethinkers!”
Bring friends!
Who: Lori Lipman Brown, SCA
What: Freedom from religion in America
Where: Knatvold Room of the University Unitarian Church (map)
When: Saturday, December 1, 2007 at 7:00PM
Lori Lipman Brown, of the Secular Coalition of America, will be reporting on the current issues in our nation’s capitol and what we need to do to maintain our first amendment rights.
When: December 4, 1:30 PM
Who: Prof. George Nickelsburg, Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa,
Affiliate Professor, University of Washington
What: “Books that Didn’t Make It into the Bible.”
Where: Kane Hall 110
About the speaker:
George W.E. Nickelsburg is an internationally known specialist in the field of early Judaism and the origins of Christianity. He is a graduate of Valparaiso University and earned his Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School in 1968. Nickelsburg is Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where he taught New Testament studies and early Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies for thirty-one years. Prior, he was pastor of a Lutheran Church in Akron, Ohio for three years. Dr. Nickelsburg has written seven books (among them Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah, Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins, and 1 Enoch: A Commentary on the Book of First Enoch), over 90 articles for scholarly books and journals, 200 entries for dictionaries and encyclopedias, and edited seven other books. He has been on the editorial board of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries since its inception in 1994. Also, he has served on the editorial board of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly for eight years and was an editor of The Dictionary of Judaism in the Biblical Period and of the forthcoming Dictionary of Religious Writings in Antiquity.
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Many of the religious persuasion are quite confident that their particular holy book is completely infallible - an inerrant command directly from on high. However, any even cursory study of early Christianity reveals the Bible to be inspired fiction at best. I am sure that this lecture will be quite interesting from a scholarly standpoint.
If you would like to familiarize yourself with some of the material beforehand, I would highly recommend the Early Christian Writings website.
Hi All,
I hope everyone has had a pleasant thanksgiving. We’re going to be doing a screening this week of the first part of a British documentary entitled “A Brief History of Disbelief”. The screening is going to be held in the Chapel on the Ave again. For those who don’t know how to get there, directions are here.
Time: Monday 5pm – 7pm
Location: Chapel on the Ave, Upstairs Lounge
Topic: Film Screening: A Brief History of Unbelief, Part 1
Facebook: http://washington.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7445766740
From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/atheism.shtml
Shadows of Doubt
Jonathan Miller visits the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first ‘unbelievers’ in Ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic.
Hope you all have a fantastic thanksgiving!
Time: Monday 5pm – 7pm
Location: HUB 209 (Note, new room!)
Topic: Why aren’t Christians learning what atheists believe?
Facebook: http://washington.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7445766740
Why do Christians as a community seem so incurious about atheist arguments about Christianity?
Why can’t I find any prominent Christians who are conversant in sociobiology or know the specifics of the Randi million dollar challenge?
Are atheists not doing a good enough job of promoting their arguments?
Are Christians scared of what they’ll discover if they start learning atheist material?
Are the two sides simply operating off mutually incompatible mental frameworks?
Or am I off base and these Christians do exist and I’m simply unaware of them.
Regardless of your beliefs, I believe it’s basic intellectual integrity to be aware of the best arguments from the other side and I think Christianity as a institution has failed in this task.
(not to pick on Christians. If anything, I think Muslims are even more incurious).
Hang
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