Friday, July 29, 2011

Ask An Atheist

A few weeks ago someone posted an event on one of the local meetup groups for Ask An Atheist.  The idea was to get together at a park downtown and let people ask us questions.  Well, I went and met up with some friends, but we never did find the organizers, so we wandered for a while, wound up picking up other atheists who came to attend (we can smell our own), and because we weren't really prepared, we wound up adjourning to the local bar for drinks and conversation with one another.  I think that's what we atheists are just prone to do.

Anyway, the conversation was fun and we decided to it again some time, with better organization.  Well, tomorrow (Saturday, July 30) is it, and I guess I wound up being the organizer!  Stace wound up helping me create flyers with information on atheist resources to give out and a friend said he wound bring a table and some chairs.  We're meeting up tomorrow and we'll see what happens.

There are 20 people signed up and I don't know most of them.  I'm really not sure how this is going to go!  I love arguing with people, but I usually do it with people I know - I'm not actually very confrontational with strangers.  As much as I would like to tear people apart for their silly beliefs, I'm actually usually quite nice about it and don't actually get in their face.  I think fast on my feet, but there is just no way of knowing what we are going to get tomorrow.  Will we be ignored?  Will there be a fight?

I'm worried (even after I said last post that I would stop worrying so much!) about the reaction of the other atheists more than the public.  I've wanted to be a leader in the Denver community for a while now, and while I know a lot of people like me and and appreciate what I offer in the form of discussion and activism, I haven't really had the chance to lead before.  I wish I had more time this week to prepare, but work was crazy and there were a lot of distractions.  I don't want people to be bored or feel like it was run poorly.  But the commonly used analogy of organizing atheists being like herding cats will likely work in my favor - we are a pretty self-sufficient bunch and they probably don't need all that much leadership from me.

Either way, I'm pretty psyched about tomorrow!  I can't wait to see what happens and I'll have a full report by Sunday right here.

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