Join us Thursday, September 14th, 2023! The meeting will be held at the Fisher Student Center in the Sunset Beach Room (#1025) at 5:30 PM. The room is located along the hallway across from the UNCW Bookstore near and the water fountains.
Our first meeting was a success! We got to know one another and learn a bit about each other’s history. During open discussion, topics ranged from concerns about how family members might react to being irreligious, to the controversial anti-drag queen laws.
Goals for this meeting:
• Demonstrate the ascw.org website and seek editors
• Search for new officers
• Outreach through flyers and chalking
• Open discussion on any topics
Minutes
- Explored the ascw.org website, showing parts of the resources section.
- Mentioned Aron Ra and primatologist Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) being potential virtual guest speakers in future meetings, playing a short clip from a video they did together.
- A brief exploration of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website, their formal attire being pirate regalia, and availability to become a reverend of the church in order to perform wedding ceremonies.
- A brief exploration of The Satanic Temple, their atheistic stance, and their purpose in fighting for a separation of church and state. One method has been the threat of installation of their Baphomet statue anywhere the Ten Commandments appear on government property.
- A discussion on the fact that atheists are a minority within the US, vastly outweighed by Christians. Various studies place specifically atheists at around 3%, and agnostics representing about 4%, while irreligious account for about 22%.
- A discussion on discrimination against atheists, as well as the threats that exist in other countries for being atheist, including Islamic countries that consider apostacy as punishable by death.
- A discussion on Wilmington’s racist history and being the location of the countries only successful coup which resulted in the murder of several black Americans and destruction of their property, homes, and businesses.