March 21
Democracy Was the First Casualty:
How America Learned to Treat Losing as an Act of War
Meeting # 3,857 - college regular Tim Bolger
What can we learn from history?? – Tim Bolger will develop parallels and reflections on what needs to be done.
The speaker stats that "The American Civil War began the moment Americans decided democracy was only legitimate when it delivered the “correct” outcome. Decades before cannon fire, the country normalized contempt for compromise, weaponized grievance, and taught itself to believe that defeat was fraud, tyranny, or betrayal. By placing the moral rot of the 1850s side by side with the Trump era, this talk makes a blunt claim: America is not flirting with crisis—it is repeating a pattern it already knows leads to catastrophe. The most dangerous lie in American politics is not that the other side is wrong, but that they are illegitimate. Once a nation accepts that idea, the question is no longer whether the system survives, but how much damage is done before it breaks."
March 7
The God-question: Arguments for and against
the Existence of God
Meeting # 3,856 - Prof. Bob Lichtenbert, Ph.D., books by https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/bob-lichtenbert/2901782/?
The existence of God, called "the God-question," is one of the most meaningful questions that all people ought to ask every day all their adult lives because of the immortal afterlife implied.
I will briefly make these three arguments for God's existence:
1) the universe needs a supernatural cause to make it exist,
2) the Earth has a grand plan that only God can design, and
3) literally millions of people have experienced God in advanced mental states.
I will then make these arguments against the existence of God:
1) there is too much evil for God to exist, and
2) the universe has recently been discovered to be so unimaginably vast that God would not care about one person on Earth.
I will state my own position on the God-question at the end of my talk.
