Meetup at Dead Man's Pub

We changed the meet-up time from 8pm to 7pm.  It went gang-busters. I don't like to count, but we used up all the chairs, it was quite a group there. I joked about the balcony collapsing under the weight and we all laughed nervously.  The question this week came from (person A) who shared that he had been reading Alain De Botton’s The Consolation of Philosophy , in particular the chapter entitled “Consolations for a Broken Heart”, focusing on Arthur Schopenhauer. Below is a photo of Schopenhauer laughing.  Schopenhauer believed that subconsciously we selected a partner on the basis of who would be the best to create children with. (An insight I find amazing for the mid Eighteenth century!) Schopenhauer is regarded as the Grandfather of psychology, there’s some debate about the extent to which he influenced Freud – but it seems pretty clear to me that both Freud and Brentano were both impacted by him: even though they didn’t entirely agree

There wasn’t as many as usual.  In fact, there were only two of the usual people. I gave a recap on where we’d journeyed so far and talked briefly about night terrors and consciousness. (Person A)   asked the question: when I say consciousness did I mean awareness.   In an attempt to be helpful (Person B) addressed the question with reference to John Locke: that one of the components of Personhood was awareness.   (A) said something about Locke which I didn’t quite catch. Something to the effect that Locke was able to resolve an issue to do with consciousness  But (A) said it wasn’t helpful starting with the self and that we are always set in relation to others and that is the more important issue. It was not helpful being self-referential about consciousness because it doesn’t get us anywhere. I agreed with the point. However I worried a little because it was important that we move only as quickly as the points were raised by the group, not to dismiss questio

Again. I’m most certainly not a psychologist. For years I've dealt with people sharing their stories. Sunday night is not so much a ‘story-telling’ place, as rather a place where we encourage people to go, “I’ve been thinking about this… what are people’s take on this issue?”  As part of that process people do tend to share anecdotes that challenge their world view, or provide information and evidence to go – this LOOKS supernatural, however there is a scientific explanation. One of the things I omitted to mention in my summary last week was the discussion of ghosts. It came up because I mentioned that the topic of ghosts disrupts our ‘bricks and mortar’ view of the world. I realize that there are no definitive results from research about ghosts (actually, I haven’t looked into this recently, so maybe there’s people who AREN’T crackpots, but I doubt it). However, in my time I’ve spoken to a number of people who have claimed to have seen ghosts. By and large

In less than two hours we’re meeting tonight. Disclaimer: I’m rushing the Blog this week because my week was a mess: super busy with a whole bunch of things that were urgent were pressing in upon me and then, then I did something catastrophically stupid that resulted in me needing to rewrite an exam from scratch. Further disclaimer: my aim in meeting is for people to discuss whatever issue they want. I don’t intend to direct or interfere with the content of the discussion. God just keeps turning up all on His own.   So, without further adieu here is my grammatically ruinous relay of last weeks discussion. Last week we wrapped up around a question about the problem of evil. So this was where we opened: According to the Bible God is: All good All knowing All powerful So when we consider the tsunami where thousands of people were killed, God unconcerned with killing good along with those who ‘had it coming’. Now if that’s the case, then God’s not tha