Gods and egos and subjugation, oh my!

I'm impressed that your group can maintain a civil dialogue about atheist & christian ideas with members from both parties. Well done!

Good for you.

Seems weird to me — like reading physics books one month and astrology books the next! Better to just switch between fiction and non-fiction.

It's an antiquated view, and one I hope will eventually go away. But like anything that assigns power to a specific group, it'll take a while before that power goes away.

If two people get married they automatically give up part of their freedom. Submissive? The question is how submissive. If each is not somewhat submissive I don’t see how they can stay married. It’s a Tao thing.

Honestly I’m beginning to view the bible as a poisoned chalice. If you look at the quality of the ‘truths’ it provides, many of them are highly suspect, and that must make you wonder about how worthwhile the rest of it might be. With the possible exception of the life of Jesus seen purely as a human spiritual teacher I think it’s highly tainted.

So engaging with others on a book club where half of them want to read Christian works seems a little difficult. Discussing with people who operate from biblical sayings rather than from a reasoned perspective of the world seems fraught with trouble once you get past the surface pleasantries, as I think you encountered with the guy and his attempt to argue for ‘submissive wives’.

This is called complementarianism. The notion that men and women have complementary roles and so must stay in their respective lanes. Men are the protectors and providers, women the nurturers and homemakers.

I think that at least since WW2 women have had all sorts of non-homemaking roles and have demonstrated their versatility quite well. Yet this notion persists. Just yesterday I saw Louise Mensch, a conservative diva on Twitter, say that she didn't think women constitutionally make good software developers. Oh, she's sure that a few do coding, but it's not in their nature, and she certainly doesn't.

It didn't take five minutes for software god Grady Booch to point out that Ada Lovelace was the first to conceptualize, in the 19th century, that instructions could be separate from data, and wrote a program to illustrate that before there were even computers. That Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler and invented the COBOL language in the 1950s. That Margaret Hamilton pretty much invented the discipline of software engineering at NASA in the 1960s, while authoring much of the operating system of the Apollo spacecraft and lunar lander.

I hired a woman to help me on a project back in the 1990s and she was until recently the best software developer I'd ever collaborated with. Some of us men think women are actually better than us at math and logic or anything that requires attention to detail.

Despite all this there are people who somehow think women are best kept barefoot and pregnant. Because god.

Why don’t you just join a normal book club? I am a member of one, we just read all kinds of books and nobody in the group knows the religious views of the others. I think there is no purpose in deliberately engaging in this sort of debate. As a lifelong freethinker and nontheist I don’t give any thought at all to biblical texts, they are fiction.

Get me a sandwich! ((running for cover!))

I could never join such a book club. Having to listen to theist nonsense would drive me crazy.

If you're an atheist why join an atheist/Christian book club?

And what is an atheist book?

I love that idea for a book club. Have there been any defections yet?
I'd recommend "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver. It's not specifically theist or anti-theist but it deals with religious mania. And, of course, "The Handmaid's Tale" for your 'friend'.

Oh come on. Being submissive to men is only natural!?

That was one of the big reasons Jimmy Carter left his church.

So you and I are not alone on this.

The reason I don't can't won't engage. Indoctrination makes it very difficult to have a real discussion, instead spewing ideas past each other. Plus the ideals the old texts are based of often view women as property not partners and it's very hard to get past that if we want to live in a progressive world

The submission thing is something I have an enormous problem with and find monstrously distasteful. The first time I ever came across it was at a cousin's wedding, and hearing the Baptist minister give some weighty spiel on how the wife was to make bloody sure she did exactly what her new husband instructed her to, or else...

My jaw was on the floor!

I think I've seen you mention this reading group the other day, and I've wondered since then how on earth it can work without devolving into vitriolic arguments. Does the person running it have a knack for cutting off discussions when they start straying into high emotion?

Don't know if I'd like that but the concept is interesting. You could do the same with left and right politically. Don't know how that would end either.

What a brilliant idea. (not the submissive women idea, the book club!)

I bet there are some fantastic 'frank exchanges of views' over tea and cakes

No way I'd attend a book club that discussed Christian books with Christians. I read for my own pleasure, not to have religious debates and discussions.

I only want to have book clubs with people who enjoy the kind of books I love also so we can discuss our favorite passages..not do some boring debate.

Ooh - I love this idea for a book club!