What happened last meeting
During last week’s meeting, philosophically named “Everybody Poops”, we welcomed a couple of new faces, and I’m happy to see that the list of persons interested in participating in the discussion is still growing.
The first main topic of discussion was authority. Such questions were raised as What is authority? Could we live without the concept of authority? Is authority a bad thing? When should authority be challenged? How does someone get authority? Can authority be ‘dissolved’? Although the discussion of these things started to become somewhat philosophical at some point, and I lost track a bit because of that, I think that we eventually agreed that authority in itself is not a thing we can do without (although some argued we should try!) There were some really nice anecdotes by discussion members about confronting authority (at work, for example, or against a teacher after receiving a grade), but it became clear that confronting authority is not always an easy thing to do. You could, for example, get fired, or you might find that the opportunity does not arise to do something about it at all. Personally, I think that we should keep true to our ideal and try to keep listening to our private authority. Furthermore, to keep things practical, I would like to ask you to think about the following: are there sources of authority in our society that are illegitimate?
The second topic revolved around spirituality. We learned some things about what this concept means in Islam by Sulur, who explained that Islamic people (and perhaps Jews and Christians too?) refer everything back to the one true ‘constant’, which is the Name of God. Each time, before making important decisions, a Muslim utters a phrase that comes down to “in the Name of God...”, thereby reminding himself of the importance of his acting, but also of the one true constant to which everything else is relative. Please correct me if I got that wrong.
I know some more things have been discussed in a smaller group, but I was at that time busy talking to other people. I noticed that Kim was making notes throughout the discussion though, and I’m hoping that she would be so kind to share them with us (put them on the forum!)