DC Atheists Meetup

Travis McKie-Voerste will be speaking to us. He is an advocate for secular, evidence based mental health care, serving as the Director of the Secular Therapy Project where he works with a team to ensure that clients seeking therapy without religious frameworks can access qualified mental health professionals.

For all new people – Only vetted secular people will receive the meeting links with a separate email. Please see the instructions at the end of this post. Our meetings are much more pleasurable without Christian trolls zoom booming our discussions. The vetting is worth the effort.

Every month there is a new array of catastrophic stupidities paving our road to a Christian nationalist autocracy. We are at this posting at day 33 of a government shutdown. Republicans are claiming without merit that Democrats are doing this to fund medical care for illegal immigrants. That is a pure lie. Access to medical care for immigrants with a legal status or those being stabilized in emergency rooms will continue with or without anything being advanced by Democrats. All other access to federally funded medical care is prohibited and will remain so. They also claim that emergency funds for the SNAP food program cannot be spent for that program. That program funds nine times as many meals as all food pantry charities combined. Two courts have already ordered the Agriculture Department to follow the law and fund SNAP. The lie that it could not be done was just a very lame attempt to blame Democrats for people going hungry.

The Virginia GOP Gubernatorial campaign highlights the anti-trans Christian nationalist bigotry of its base. Nearly every ad includes fear mongering about a nearly completely non-existent threat from trans girls. This stupidity is likely to be rejected by about a 10% margin.

The National Guard in Chicago is being used as part of a plan to terrorize Latino communities. The residents of entire apartment buildings are being arrested and detained, including the American citizens and children. The fact that the citizens are later released does not ameliorate the trauma and terror inflicted by an explicitly unconstitutional racist, xenophobic dragnet. Indiscriminate use of tear gas and pepper balls are used without warning. A recent Supreme Court emergency docket decision has allowed sweeping indiscriminate ICE operations based on racist stereotypes and Spanish being spoken. Kristi Noam insists that this explicit violation of the 4th Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures somehow makes us safer.

10,000 military personnel are part of operations designed to kill asserted drug runners in international waters. Venezuela is a minor part of drug smuggling into America but it is a primary target. These murders are explicitly against international law. Given the scale of operations these civilians could be arrested and tried. But the killing is the point. Administration spokespeople are claiming that current anti-drug smuggling does not work so they have to do something different. Oh, and the “War Department” has now been instructed to develop plans to go into Nigeria. Trump claims he might do it “with guns blazing” to protect Christians.

Obviously there are many dozens of other mind boggling insanities available for our next community meeting and discussions. Let us not to forget to have fun in spite of all of this. Our community is here to both acknowledge the chaos and somehow remain sane in spite of insanity. We can connect and share our thoughts on how to remain positive.

Please see directions below for new members who would like to receive the zoom link to attend.

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Our meetings have become a target for organized zoom bombing. Our major topic of discussion has been Christian nationalism and its hideous impacts across America. They have good reason to try to force us to stop our meetings. This requires us to work to preclude militant religious extremists from wrecking our meetings.

We will not post the zoom link for our meeting. The zoom link information will be delivered by email or direct personal messaging to trusted attendees only. I am now comfortable that this procedure works well enough so that a zoom waiting room will not be required.
I have a Google Voice phone number, (202) 643-4366. I do not answer calls to that number. But it does an excellent job of transcribing messages. People can use this number to verbally describe items requested in a possible email below.
I use the email: don1wharton (at) outlook (dot) com for social media, including Meetup. Please email the following:

Name:
Zoom ID if different than name:
your email to receive zoom info:
Specify that you are RSVPing for this meeting only if you
do not want to receive future zoom invites.

--People can UNSUBSCRIBE by replying to a future zoom invite with UNSUB in the subject line.
If you are a first time attendee, please share prior secular activities or cite your prior secular meetup attendance (making sure it is visible for us to confirm it) or arrange for a brief phone or zoom interview at a time of your convenience. This should insure enjoyable meetings.
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