Come listen to Dr. Darrel Ray talk to us in Woodburn 100 on 4/30 at 5pm.

For thousands of years, religion has woven its way through societies and people as if it were part and parcel to that society or person. In large measure it was left unexplained and unchallenged, it simply existed. Those who attempted to challenge and expose religion were often persecuted, excommunicated, shunned, or even executed. It could be fatal to explain that which the church, priest or imam said was unexplainable. Dr. Ray discusses this and much more in his engaging and entertaining presentation.

Dr. Ray is a psychologist and student of religion, sociology and anthropology. He is also founder of Recovering from Religion. http://www.recoveringreligionists.com

His insights on religion and religious infection have been praised by authors and experts like Dale McGowan, Dan Barker, Frank Schaeffer, Edwin Kagin, and many others. The God Virus has been top of the Science and Religion best sellers on Amazon for several months.

Learn how his revolutionary ideas explain: the fundamentalism of your Uncle Ned, the sexual behavior of a fallen mega church minister, the child rearing practices of a Pentecostal neighbor, why 19 men flew planes into the World Trade Center, why religion protects pedophile priests and how it might affect a person’s IQ.

Come join us for our weekly discussion meeting in the Dogwood Room of the IMU.

This week we will be discussing how to build community in the atheist movement. One large complaint among people transitioning to a secular lifestyle is the lack of community like a church provides. We will be talking about ways to cover that gap, or if it is even something worth considering.

I hope to see you there.

Come join us for our weekly movie night in Swain East 105.

This week we will be watching Deliver Us from Evil. Deliver Us from Evil is a documentary film directed by Amy J. Berg which tells the true story of Catholic priest Oliver O’Grady, who admited to having sexually abused/molested and raped approximately twenty five children in Northern California between the late 1970s and early 1990s. The film won the Best Documentary Award at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

What better way to get back into the swing of things after Spring Break than some good ole child molestation by priests?

Come join us for our weekly Movie Night in Swain East 105 at 8pm.

This week we will be watching History of the World, Part I. This is a great film by Mel Brooks. It certainly fits into our “good movies that are marginally related to religion” theme for most of the semester.

Come join us for the last movie night before Spring Break.

Victor Stenger will be speaking with us in W. Wright Education Building 1120 at 6:00pm.

Here is a brief description of his talk:

Is There Evidence for Life After Death?

In his 2009 book Life After Death: The Evidence Dinesh D’Souza says that reason and science “supply new and persuasive evidence for the afterlife—evidence that wasn’t there before.” Similar assertions have been made by Deepak Chopra in his 2006 book Life After Death: The Burden of Proof and others. These conclusions are based on studies of past-life memories, near-death experiences, and various paranormal claims. They also rely on the notion that quantum mechanics has provided reason to believe that consciousness is a separate entity from our bodies and brains and thus able to survive death. I will examine this evidence from the point-of-view of a physicist who spend forty years studying the fundamental structure of the universe.

Vic Stenger received a PhD in Physics from UCLA in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. His current position is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England, and the University of Florence in Italy. He also has bee a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England and the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy.

Dr. Stenger’s research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The project leader received the Nobel Prize in 2002 for this work.

Vic Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of nine critically acclaimed popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. His 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist was a New York Times bestseller. His last two books, which came out in 2009, are Quantum Gods and The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.

Please come join us.