Meeting minutes!  This week, we talked about Alcoholics Anonymous, and then What the Bleep!? and Quantum Mechanics.

Remember: February 12 is Darwin Day, which is Darwin’s 200th Birthday!  Expect to see us on Bruin Walk.  Also, February 18 is when Dan Barker, copresident of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, is coming over for a talk.

Meetings are on fridays, 5-7 pm in Ackerman 2408.

Meeting discussion

We talked about Alcoholics Anonymous, a group intended to help people with alcohol addiction. From a secularist’s perspective, the problem with AA is that sometimes people are just giving up one addiction, alcoholism, for an addiction to religion. Sometimes, AA is pretty open to nontheists, but they are also strongly based on having a “higher power”.

Several members had anecdotes (keeping in mind that they are only anecdotes) of family members who had problems with the religiosity of AA. One person’s uncle became a fundamentalist Christian after going to AA. Another person’s father had to leave AA after realizing his sponsor had no qualifications, and simply saw his alcoholism as a result of his lapsed Catholicism.

Some questions that came up: Is alcoholism a disease, or a moral failing? Or can it be considered both (since both therapy and drugs can work to fix it)? Is SOS, secular organizations for sobriety, a good alternative? Do people who are alcoholic have an addictive personality which perhaps predisposes them to getting into religion? It seems that many AA members pick up smoking, even as they quit drinking. Does the accountability implied by a God in fact help a person keep off alcohol? After all, complicated rational reasons are hard to keep in mind when you’re drunk.

Mikael is the skeptic of the week for his winning insect analogy. See, alcoholism is like a butterfly. The alcohol has stripped you of your wings, but then you go into a cocoon (the cocoon is God) and you come out a butterfly! Amazing. We love this guy.

Our second topic was What the Bleep!? and Quantum Mechanics. What the Bleep Do We Know!? is a film which uses misinterpretations of quantum mechanics to promote a rather new age view of the world. The really funny part is that the film is a basically a front from this cult which is run by a woman JZ Knight who channels a 35,000 year old Atlantean warrior spirit named Ramtha.

So we spent a lot of time talking about the Double Slit Experiment, the Copenhagen Interpretation, Schrödinger’s Cat, and other aspects of Quantum Mechanics. I could probably talk about this stuff for hours (being a rather knowledgeable physics student), but I didn’t get enough time. Let’s just say that What the Bleep!? gravely misunderstands the relationship in Quantum Mechanics between macroscopic and microscopic behavior. The rest of the details of our discussion are hard to reproduce, as I spent more time talking than taking notes.  However (self promotion alert!), I will point you all to my review of the What the Bleep!? on my own blog.

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