Hark, and sorry this is so close to the day of:

My Philadelphia Brights Meetup Group is having a munch Monday (9 July) evening at 7, at the Barnes & Noble cafe at 1805 Walnut St., and my proposed topic is designing a popular tract to promote critical thinking. Why, after all, should we leave broadly accessible propaganda to the believers?

Now, I've seen some atheist tracts. The best known is probably "Kissing Hank's A--" (I censored the last word because of this board's rule against cursing). But I think that's really a couple shades too obvious, except maybe for people who are very close to becoming atheists anyway and just need a little validation to take the last step.

Better are some of the tracts devised by a group called the Robert Ingersoll Collective. I picked up a couple of these a few years ago at a music store, and think the one titled "Doctor God" is particularly good. It reviews some of the absurd "medical" advice found in the "Books of Moses" and contrasts these to real medical science, including some things that were within the means of that period, such as bread molds to fight infections, had there only been an omniscient being to tell people about them.

But what I'm really interested in is not so much disabusing people of a particular false belief, but rather helping them learn how to think for themselves in general. One approach might be to find concise accounts by people who used to hold ill-founded beliefs, presented in a way that illustrates how to critically examine one's own. Another tack could be to tell allegorical stories to illustrate the same point.

I encourage people to come to the munch and suggest their own ideas about how to do this. If you can't make it 9 July, perhaps you can come to the next one on 13 August, same time and place. You can RSVP at http://brights.meetup.com/263.

Eric Hamell
Gondwanaland -- http://stripey7.blogspot.com

I am including the events in Phactum, but why are meetings called a "munch"? What is that all about?

Many years before Meetup.com existed, certain subcultures (some of which I'm involved with) were using e-mail to organize face-to-face meetings over a meal, in a public setting, for people with shared interests, who otherwise had no way of safely exploring them. These events were (and continue to be) called munches. It's in honor of that tradition that I've been using the same term for my Brights group's Meetups since I took over as its organizer.

Although no one else came to last night's munch, I used the time to write a draft of my proposed critical thinking tract. You can read it here:

http://stripey7.blogspot.com/2007/07/introducing-worlds-first-critical.html

Feedback welcome!

Eric

Thanks for mentioning our group's pamphlets. We have several tracts exploring many different aspects of the bible, as well as several tracts covering the philosophy of Robert Ingersoll and others who have given the world positive, humanistic philosophies to live by. We also have a space: http://jahneverwas.spaces.live.com

Thanks again for the mention.

Ben Alken
Jared Monk
The Ingersoll Collective