Atlanta Freethought Society Meeting

Speck Pratt is the President/CEO for Sunday Assembly Atlanta. They are also involved with Radical Faeries.  (Go to links for more info on these groups.)

Speck will discuss Neil Gaiman’s Hugo and Nebula Awards-winning book American Gods, using it to apply critical theory to atheist and skeptical thinking.

If you’d like to learn more about the book, which can be purchased at Amazon, following is an Amazon editorial review from reader Therese Littleton:

American Gods is Neil Gaiman’s best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit.  Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn’t sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he’s been delivering since his Sandman days….

More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country—our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what’s real and what’s not.”

Speck will mention American Gods but just as a unifying theme, not really as a book review.  Speck likes the critical theory applied to atheism in the book, and will tell us more about it. 

Speck’s general strategy is to go through a panoply of things that most people think is true as a way towards compassion and intellectual humility, and how atheism and skepticism are incomplete without critical theory.

AFS always meets on the second Sunday of the month unless otherwise noted.

We generally meet at noon for socializing, and then the talk starts at 1:00. The facility is wheelchair accessible. Atlanta Freethought Hall is a former Primitive Baptist Church, built in 1866. Atlanta Freethought Society was founded in 1985, which makes it one of Metro Atlanta’s oldest secular societies. AF Hall is the meeting place for Fellowship of Reason, Freedom of Religion Foundation of Atlanta, as well as other organizations. We rent the building at reasonable rates. If you would like to rent the hall for an organization meeting, a party, a wedding, etc., please see a Board Member.