Iowa Secularists

Wednesday December 3. Cedar Rapids. Townhall meeting to meet with the Executive Director about the organization. 7-9pm at Lori’s house. Please RSVP for the address. * Rescheduled for Wednesday, December 17

Thursday, December 4. Iowa City. Townhall meeting to meet with the Executive Director about the organization. 7-9pm at Brian and Jaime Sabel’s house. Please RSVP for directions.

Thursday, December 11. Coralville. Iowa City/Coralville Meetup 7pm Old Chicago Pizza.

Saturday, December 13. Des Moines. Townhall meeting to meet with the Executive Director about the organization. 10am-12pm in the back meeting room at the Panera Bread on 42nd Street in West Des Moines.

Sunday, December 14. Cedar Rapids. Townhall meeting. 2-4pm at Niles and Carol Ross’s house. Please RSVP for the address.

Sunday, December 14. Cedar Falls/Waterloo, Meetup Holiday Giving Get-Together, 4pm at Jill and Andrew’s house.

This holiday the Cedar Falls/Waterloo Iowa Secularists would like to collect items for the following charities: Shoes That Fit, Toys for Tots

Please plan to bring any items you wish to donate to our house between 4-6pm on Sunday, Dec 14. I’d like to print out the IS logo and tie it to the items with holiday ribbons. Then, at 6:00 we will take everything to a drop-off site and go out to eat together. We can determine where depending on the interest of those in attendance.

Additionally, in the same spirit of giving – the UNI Freethinkers and Inquirers are sponsoring a local family for the holiday season and is asking if anyone in the IS meet-up group is interested in participating in this as well. More information is coming from Cody.

Wednesday, December 17. Cedar Rapids Townhall meeting to meet with the Executive Director about the organization. 7-9pm at Lori’s house. Please RSVP for the address.

Thursday, December 18. West Des Moines. Des Moines Meetup. 7pm, Firkin and Fox.

Thursday, December 18. Marion. Cedar Rapids Meetup. 7pm. Naso’s, 453 7th Ave, Marion.

Saturday, December 20. Iowa City. Capanna Coffee Meetup. Capanna Coffee Co. 136 S. Dubuque St., downtown Iowa City. 10:00am.

Saturday, December 20. Des Moines. Iowa Secularists Winter Solstice Soiree.

We will have our first Iowa Secularists Winter Solstice Soiree at the Drake Municipal Observatory! The Observatory is jointly operated by the City of Des Moines and Drake University and contains a refracting telescope which will provide an excellent way to observe the solstice sky!

We will begin at 7pm with appetizers followed by a tour of the observatory and a presentation. We will then have the opportunity to view the night’s sky at about 8:30pm, weather permitting.

This event is semi-formal and tickets are $30 per person. To purchase a ticket, please use the PayPal link located in the post below or send a check to Iowa Secularists, P.O. Box 883, Iowa City, IA 52244. Please have all tickets purchased or arrangements made by December 18th so that we may plan accordingly.

*More events will be added as they are scheduled.

The year is 1375. A couple of grimly pious men hustle another bound and hooded man atop a rough platform of freshly hewn timber and assorted wooden planks. They tie his arms to the stake at the center of the unlit pyre and offer him one last chance to recant his heresy. History knows this man only as “Loffler,” and his reputed final words haunt modern atheists who have not endured intolerance of this magnitude. He yells, “Burn me if you wish, but you have not enough wood to burn chance which rules the world!”

Atheism, as it would come to be known years later, did not yet exist when Loffler was murdered, but his group, “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” helped pave the way for free-thinking by asserting that the world behaved mechanistically rather than in divinely driven ways. As such, it was strikingly similar to the Ancient Greek school of thought that is generally considered the first atheistic philosophy – Epicureanism.

Etymological ancestors of the English word “atheist” go all the way back to ancient Greece, where a means “without” and theos, “a god.” Epicureanism is much credited with bringing the first cogently atheos philosophy to prominence, though the term was mainly used by Epicurus’ detractors rather than the Epicureans themselves.

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher contemporary with Aristotle (300 B.C.E.), and his philosophic school was fairly influential for many years. Students of history may remember that Socrates was executed primarily for blasphemy against the Greek gods. How then did Epicurus avoid such a fate? Epicurus and his followers denied being atheos, and argued instead that the gods had no concern for human affairs and did not intervene in them. If that sounds like Enlightenment Deism, it should. That was just one of several similarities. Epicureans also argued that the world operated on predictable mechanistic principles, and they believed in Democritus’ atomic theory of physicality. Further, Epicurean notions of justice and ethics appear to be based on secular notions much resembling the “social contract theory,” which came to prominence much later with thinkers like Thomas Hobbes. The Epicureans avoided the scorn of the orthodox much the same way Jeffersonian-style Deists did, by not directly challenging the existence of gods, and by pointing out that the world did not need gods to explain the world.

With the rise of the Roman Empire, Epicureanism faded out of prominence and a truly atheos philosophy would not redevelop until the Enlightenment.

Getting back to the development of the term “atheist,” it begins to appear in French writing in the 1500s, borrowing from the Greek atheos. Common derivations appeared as athéiste, “godless;” athéisme, “belief in godlessness;” and athée, “one who is godless.” The English form, atheist, comes directly from the French, but clearly, English’s atheist is closer to the meaning “one who is godless.” However, as will be explained below, there is no clear cut definition even of the English form.

Definitions in English dictionaries vary in some key respects with the term atheist. The American Heritage Dictionary defines atheist as “one who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.” This definition blends both a merely skeptical aspect, “one who disbelieves,” with a more absolutist position of “denies existence….”

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines atheist as “one who believes that there is no deity.” This is another definition which emphasizes an assertion of knowledge that there is no supreme being, but this one makes no mention of multiple deities.

The Oxford Online Dictionary defines atheist as, “the belief that God does not exist.” This is very interesting for several reasons. First, we have the absolutist position from a knowledge standpoint coupled with a capitalized form of “God” and no mention of “gods,” which seems to leave open the possibility that atheists might not hold the belief that “gods” do not exist. Second, this appears to be a somewhat propagandistic definition that implicitly pays homage to the one “God.” The inference is that atheists deny what we all know to be true – that God exists.

The Cambridge Dictionary’s online definition is somewhat more accommodating and philosophically complete. It reads, “Someone who believes that God or gods do not exist.” The only problem with this definition is the common assertion of positive knowledge. Following the tradition of Epicurus, atheos lines of thinking have asserted mechanistic explanations of causality; the modern child of this tradition is the scientific method. For the most part, both then and now, atheistic thinkers do not assert knowledge that God or gods do not exist, rather that there simply is no evidence to countenance such a claim.

Modern atheism is, to be sure, a pluralistic system of belief with no definitive core. However, as stated above, most thinkers who identify themselves as atheists tend to assert that they are skeptical of the existence of a supreme being or beings rather than assert knowledge of the fact of providential non-existence. Further, the term atheist comes to us from ancient Greece and 16th Century France where it stands today, with multiple definitions.

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