A big thank you to everyone who participated in the SWiFT event this past Friday evening. For those of you that did not attend, you really missed a good show.
Local author and fellow SWiFT member M. Anton Mikicic gave a very informative talk about his book god is redundant. He is a great speaker and really related to the audience well. Tom Flynn gave an incredibly thorough treatment of the current (and past) state of the demographics of freethought today. He gave a lot of useful background into how people manipulate statistics for their own purposes. We learned that out of the 40 million plus “Nones” in the United States, that many more of them are atheists than was previously thought. Much of Tom’s presentation relied on two important recent surveys: The American Religious Identification Survey and the Pew Forum Religious Landscape Survey. Both of these are available for download in their entirety on the Resources page of this website.
Tom was a very patient and gracious speaker. He fielded a number of questions from people on a range of topics – including, but not limited to, “Why do people still believe in religion?” For some, statistical analysis can be daunting; however, Tom did an outstanding job of trying to inject humor without losing the educational impact. He is a great speaker and a good friend of SWiFT. Thank you Tom!
The book signing at the end of the evening was fun. For those of you who have not purchased god is redundant, you really should. Besides supporting one of our own, it really is a good book. I will be posting a review for it shortly. Tom had copies of his sci-fi novels Galactic Rapture and Nothing Sacred, as well as, a cloth bound copy of the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief which he edited for sale.
In his presentation, Tom talked a lot about the Council for Secular Humanism and it’s magazine Free Inquiry. At the next SWiFT meeting we will be discussing both. As SWiFT members, all new subscribers are eligible for a great discount on an annual subscription.
For those who did attend, please post feedback – good or bad. SWiFT will be doing more events like this at different venues throughout southeast Wisconsin.
Again, thanks to all for making this one of SWiFT’s most successful public events!