Today my quandry is how to deal with my atheistic friends. We're trying to go as a group to see Expelled, the new film by Ben Stein. I thought it would be a good field trip since it deals with freedom of speech, ID, evolution, and the like.
When I mentioned this on Tuesday night's meeting (Occam's Coffeehouse meets at the Atlanta Bread company in Germantown at 6 pm), I was met with a most surprising reaction. A few said they'd go but pay for another movie and sneak in, and a few said they don't need to go at all. My wife had been to a discussion of Lucy with our wife's founder Janet and we've had numerous other examples of listening to an Atheist's point of view about relative topics so I was surprised. The movie was immediately termed "propaganda" and a negative disussion ensued. I actually got pretty worked up at the hypocrisy being sent out by the "atheist" side and had to leave the meeting. I apologized later in person and via email.
I also tried to make my point of how we've been to lectures by evolution-leaning scientists, watched Richard Dawkins videos, read God is not Great as a book choice, and basically been open to trying to listen at least to a point of view that was contradictory to my own.
I was surprised as to the negative emails I got and arguments that came from this. I thought we could go to this movie and enjoy it and go somewhere afterwards and discuss-maybe even argue about it.
I guess not...
More later...
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