The First Meeting

The club started off with a short, slightly silly presentation (because people don't pay attention to boring things) explaining how the club would work; what the meetings would look like, what our "constitution" was, and how our club fit into the CAS requirements. Then we gave people a chance to speak up about any ideas that they had; Gabriel suggested we make a podcast, and Martino said we could do a TED talk-like event at the end of the semester.

Then we moved on to the actual discussion. What we had planned was that that each semester would have a theme, and each session we would talk about different sub-topics of it. The theme we had decided as a cabinet was education, so I started asking open-ended questions to try to stem the discussion.

We talked about this for about half an hour, but somehow we ended up deviating from education completely and started talking about religion. Bryan showed us a website he made in seventh grade for what he called the G Cult, which states that everything and everyone was a figment of Gabriel's imagination. Urim laughed at the absurdity of that, and then we discussed why the G Cult would be different from her Christianity; do you measure the validity of a religion by it's number of followers?

Then we talked about what differentiates an inanimate object from a living being. I explained that living beings are just things that go through biological processes, and that biological processes are just a type of chemical processes, and thus the only difference between a living being and an inanimate object is that they go through different chemical processes.

When the meeting was over, the cabinet stayed behind and I asked what they thought about what happened; we all agreed that the conversation had been really interesting, even though it was off-topic.

It didn't make sense to put limitations on our discussion, therefore we decided to scrap the theme idea. Ellie said we could start each meeting with a video or something of the sort as a prompt, and then let the discussion steer itself.

The club is going to be a little different from what we had originally had in mind--if this is better, and the members enjoy it more, there is no reason other than stubbornness why we would stick to the initial idea.