Orange County Atheists

Photos from UCI Garrison-Martineau Project event

On April 23, the UCI Atheist, Agnostics & Rationalists (AAR) and Mission Viejo based Stand to Reason took part in a Garrison-Martineau Project event at UCI. Pictures of the event are available at http://quickwired.com/stories/20080423_uci_atheist_theist/.

AAR is also doing another event on April 30th from 5-6pm: "EVOLUTION IS FACT AND IT IS THE UNIFYING CONCEPT OF BIOLOGY", A lecture about evolution by UCI's Professor Ayala. Visit the group's website for more info

Niko Shows off OCA

I received this from Niko last week, and wanted to wait to post it until we were done with Villa Park stuff. Good work!

For the past 13 months I've been invited to attend the Laguna Beach Interfaith Council meetings representing the non-church affiliated in Laguna Beach. At today’s meeting, by some coincidence, the South County Outreach Program was on the meeting agenda with Thomas Whaling and Megan Smith making presentations. When the subject of food collection came up, I interjected that just last week about 40 atheists collected 200 pounds of non-perishable food and considerable money for South County Outreach. Megan verified that Orange County Atheists were very generous to SCO. In closing I mentioned that even though we (atheists) may not go to church, we can still be generous and giving. I think, as they say in my native Nu Yawk, we done good today (at least with the Laguna Beach faithful).

How to fight "In God We Trust"

It was brought up at the April meeting that we should coordinate to fight the Bakersfield lady who is pushing all the city council's to put the nation's slogan up at all the city halls. Click "Continue reading..." to see how you can help and discuss planning and strategy.

We have two good ideas:
1) Send letters to the city council members in all the cities that haven't voted yet. A common response I've seen in the paper is councilmembers saying "we heard a lot of support for this, but not a lot against it, so I voted yes". We can easily change that simply by letting them know that some people don't agree with them.

2) Have a protest at the next vote. Though this probably won't change their votes, at the very least it will get into the news (and thus the general public) that there are people strongly against mixing government and religion. It's suggested that people dress nicely (business casual is good enough) and to act professionally. Those that are willing to speak at the council meeting (you can live anywhere) may make a difference, but if you can just show up to support the group that would be great too.

Villa Park (near anaheim) is the next city to vote. Their meeting is on:
Tuesday April 22nd at 6:30pm
17855 Santiago Blvd., Villa Park, CA 92861
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=17855+Santiago+Blvd.%2C+Villa+Park%2C+CA+92861&hl=en

If anyone has some writing skills, if you could post sample letters to city councilmembers then that would help us out a lot! Also anyone with ideas or experience at protests please offer some tips!

May Meeting

The Next Orange County Atheists meeting will take place Tuesday, May 6 at 7:30PM at the International House of Pancakes at 18542 MacArthur Blvd in Irvine, near John Wayne Airport.

A map to the IHOP is available here. We'll be meeting in the upstairs meeting room. Please RSVP at this page to let us know you're coming!