Where: First Unitarian Church (605 Morewood Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213)
When: 7PM TONIGHT
RSVP at: http://www.meetup.com/CFI-Pittsburgh/events/229501578/
Center for Inquiry – Pittsburgh (formerly PSF)
Welcome to CFI’s monthly lecture night series! The title of this month’s topic is:
Reason’s Fulcrum: How Reasoning Together Strengthens the Social Contract, and How Faith Subverts It
Religious passions have been known to motivate dramatic, violent, civilization-destabilizing movements. But what of moderate, well-meaning religious faith? Most people believe that such faith has a distinctly moralizing, civilizing effect on adherents, but is this true? The full story, of course, is frequently complicated, but one particularly salient fact often goes unremarked: religious faith directly flaunts—and thereby weakens—a hugely civilizing social norm: a norm at the very heart of reason-giving practice. In fact, faith tends to unhinge a mechanism that quietly civilizes and humanizes billions of human beings. Understanding this fact gives us the lever we need to build a more humane world: one where people routinely resolve their differences via reason-giving dialogue, and we gradually overcome our species’ regrettable penchant for petty, ideology-driven factionalism.
Our presenter is Andy Norman, Carnegie Mellon University Philosophy Department faculty member and frequent contributor to the CFI publication Free Inquiry magazine.
If you have speaker suggestions and/or ideas that are in keeping with our mission, please feel free to email your suggestions to pgh@centerforinquiry.net
See you there!
P.S. We usually head to Ali Baba’s on nearby Craig Street around 5:15 or 5:30 p.m. for a pre-lecture dinner. Please leave a comment below if you are coming to dinner so we can include you in the reservation. Thanks!
To learn about all the secular groups in Pittsburgh, visit the Pittsburgh Coalition of Reason website…and you can follow Pittsburgh Secular Freethinkers and CFI on Facebook!
*CFI-Pittsburgh strives to be an ADA compliant organization. Please email pgh@centerforinquiry.net to request accommodations.
Wednesday, April 27 at 7:00 PM
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