Sunday, February 19, 2012

Firefly: Nontheistic Friends (atheistic Quakers) have been exploring Autonomy, Separatism, Independence, Virtual NTF Meetings in virtual Harbin?


Hi E,

The conversations on the Nontheist Friends' email list seemed a few years ago to have been partly exploring, conceptually, the possibility of a kind of autonomy, separatism or independence (freedom, too}, as nontheistic Friends (atheistic Quakers, also), even Meeting-wise, vis-a-vis unprogrammed Meetings (as well as religion), but that seems to have lessened these days.

I'm in the process of building a virtual Harbin Hot Springs, probably in the interactive, 3D, virtual world of ScienceSim for an actual / virtual ethnographic book I'm writing about Harbin (check out the beginning of this video to get an idea of what it might look like, these days - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nhvcHw54GE), which emerges socioculturally out of the 1960s, and which, in its alternativeness, has incorporated as 2 churches (Heart Consciousness Church - HCC - and New Age Church of Being - NACOB). (It's a beautiful place at the end of a road in a pretty valley in northern California, with lovely springs and pools, and I see many parallels between soaking in the Harbin warm pool and sitting in Quaker Meeting). There's already a Quaker Meeting in Second Life, on Sea Turtle Island, there (visit - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sea%20Turtle%20Island/197/17/27 - and see - http://secondlifequakers.ning.com/ and http://homefries.org/blog/2008/a-year-of-quaker-meeting-in-second-life/ and http://otenth.homefries.org/2007/02/10/first-quaker-worship-in-second-life/). In the process of building this virtual Harbin Hot Springs, I may also explore creating the space for a nontheistic F/friends Meeting, in-world, for people to share meeting-wise.

If you're interested in exploring an unprogrammed nontheistic Friends' Meeting in a virtual space, please let me know.

But, like Jam, I know of no on-the-ground, nontheistic, Friends/Quaker Meetings, and presently, it seems, that NTFs on this email list are finding community mostly in unprogrammed, Quaker Meetings, and mostly in the US, Britain, Canada and Australia (that I've observed).

Scott








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