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As you already know, we can’t fund ourselves the usual way because no corporate sponsor would want their brand associated with a bunch of baby eaters. So to fund projects like the film fest the rest of the year, we’ll ask you guys for donations. (No, we won’t sell you stuff, that’s cheap).

And in exchange for your donations (a minimum of P300 and a maximum of P200M), we’ll be giving each donor a plain white shirt with an FF logo on it. Wait, that doesn’t sound special enough. We’ll give each of our platinum donors an Official 2010 edition FF iShirt pro 3G — absolutely FREE! There.

Anyway, we’re having the shirts printed soon, but before we place the order, we need to know how many are interested and how many to make of each size. (Last year we forgot to take into consideration the fact that most of our male members are scrawny).

So please fill up the form below, and thanks for your support.

*Cue choir music*

Lord, teach me to be generous / teach me to serve you as I should . . .

A series of films about faith and belief will be screened at UP’s Cine Adarna on February 27… but these films will leave you with more questions than answers.

The Filipino Freethinkers Film Festival is the first film fest in the Philippines intended to challenge your thinking about belief, faith, and reason.

The films include a bittersweet one-woman show by a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, a documentary exploring the link between religion and terrorism, and a couple of short films originally screened at the American Atheist Film Festival.

“Most of us don’t question our faith or religion at all,” says Ryan Tani, president of the Filipino Freethinkers. “But when religion increasingly conflicts with reason in society, we need a public discussion of the merits of faith. Especially we Filipinos, who live under laws shaped by the Catholic Church whether we’re Catholic or not.

“Showing films that question that assumption, that faith is always a good thing… I think that’s a really important first step to get the debate going,” says Tani.

The films screened during the Filipino Freethinkers Film Festival are intended to reach out to both the religious and the irreligious, questioning long-cherished assumptions on both sides of the debate.

Letting Go of God, a one-woman show by Saturday Night Live alumna Julia Sweeney, is a funny yet touching tale of Sweeney’s conflict with the Catholic faith of her childhood. The story (with its surprising conclusion) is told in an upbeat monologue style that the New York Times called “searing and bracingly funny”.

Root of All Evil? is biologist Richard Dawkins’ look at how religious faith serves as a primary motivator for evil in today’s modern world. Throughout the two-part film, we see Dawkins taking on religious fanatics of all stripes, including disgraced pastor Ted Haggard, and building the case for humanity being better off without faith.

Fun For Heretics showcases bits of classic comedy, shocking songs and searing rants from all around the world, with clips from George Carlin, Monty Python, David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, Woody Allen, Roy Zimmerman, Marcus Brigstocke, Edward Current, and many more.

Imagine No Religion blends the funny and the serious to tackle the conflict between faith and reason. With excerpts from the late Theo Van Gogh & Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Submission” and Lisa Seidenberg’s moving memorial to 9/11, “In the Name of God.”

The Filipino Freethinkers Film Festival is on for one day only, on February 27, at Cine Adarna from 1pm to 8pm. Admission is free. For more information on the Film Fest and Filipino Freethinkers, and to RSVP, visit the FF Film Fest Facebook event page.

In case it’s not obvious, the first poster was one I made effortlessly in five minutes (while Mikong was effortlessly winning the first national Go championship). But it served its purpose in getting things started and announcing the event officially for the first time.

Anyway, here’s a proper poster Tin made. Now when you print the poster, post it all over your school and village, and hand it out to your religious family and friends, you won’t be ashamed. Ok, maybe a little.

Here’s a high-resolution version ready for printing.

And in case you haven’t already, please RSVP for the event or for the preparation meetup.

Films:

• Letting Go of God
• Root of All Evil
• Enemies of Reason
• Sex, Drugs, and Religion

and short films about

• Reason
• Science
• Secularism

Plus a short documentary on freethought in the Philippines presented by the Filipino Freethinkers (who else?).

More details about the films, the documentary, and the event itself will follow (plus a prettier poster) so please stay tuned

In the meantime, RSVP on our Facebook group page now!

The 2nd Davao Meetup was a success. I wish to thank both new and old members for making it. We had a really great time sharing our journeys and bonding with fellow freethinkers.

We had too much fun (and beer) actually, that we were not able to do an initial planning for the First FF Davao Forum. (For this we will have to do it online and discuss it on the next meetup.)

Now I’ll just give the highlights of our little Saturday night and let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

• Special thanks to Narsdoktor for the generous donation which easily took care of all the burgers and beers a dozen freethinkers consumed from 6pm till midnight. You truly were with us in spirit.

• Special thanks to Bdul for lending us his books.

• Special thanks to Harley Blvd. Motor Cafe for the great food and accommodation.

• To Ryan Tani and the rest of the FF community for your encouragement and support.

• And of course, to Skyline Bugoy for the great pictures, the rest of which can be found here:

http://s816.photobucket.com/albums/zz83/SkylineBugoy/FFT/

Thanks everyone. Can’t wait for a third.

Hello fellow freethinkers! If you’re just lurking on the facebook page or just following the blog feed, you might not be aware of the the book sharing program that’s being organized in the forum. As people who treasure real knowledge of the world I’m sure quite a few of us have a small library of great books, be it non-fiction or fiction, that we find relevant for sharpening our minds and widening our breadth of knowledge, the very things that started us down the path of becoming freethinkers.

As books do tend to be quite expensive, it would be great if we could circulate these tomes of knowledge throughout the group instead of just sitting around on our bookshelves gathering dust. A great decentralized library of freethinking if you will. To me this would do two great things for the group:

1. Enrich the group as a whole intellectually and perhaps spiritually (in the secular sense!)
2. Build a greater sense of community and fellowship amongst the FF members.

To facilitate this, I’ve started a Filipino Freethinker’s community on the Unlibrary website. Unlibrary handles the logistics of collating the list of books that members have  and presenting it as a lending library as well as the requests for books between members of the community.

The Rough Rules of Sharing

As we’re just starting out on this, I’d like to keep the rules for the book sharing pretty loose. Here are  3 uncommandments of the FF unlibrary:

1. This goes without saying but take good care of the books. These are books someone is personally entrusting you with! It may be a good idea to exchange phone numbers so there’s a way to contact each other,  just in case.
2. The default pickup/drop-off for books are on the FF meetups – this gives a default book loan period of 2 weeks. Do feel free to make arrangements outside the FF meetups though if it’s more convenient.
3. As an indicator that you’re going to be at the meetups regularly (and thus able to return books), borrowers should have attended at least 3 other FF meetups on a roughly regular schedule.

If you have any other suggestions or refinements to these rules, please bring it up on the forum thread or the comments section.

Getting Involved in the Unlibrary

Make an account on Unlibrary and follow these steps! Unfortunately I can’t seem to link directly to the FF unlibrary community page so please bear with me:

Step 1:  Add your books to the library

1. On the left navigation bar, click on My Library then Add Books
2. Search for a book you want to add to the library by title, author or ISBN.
3. Hover over the book you own and click Add book to Library
4. Tag and rate the book and save
5. Repeat for other books you want to share!
6. You can now see your books by going to My Library and Bookshelf. While you’re over there you might want to add reviews of the books!

Step 2:  Join the FF community

1. Go to the left navigation bar, click on Communities and then Find new Ones
2. At the search box type “Filipino Freethinkers“
3. Click on Join on the right side of the search results

Step 3:  Browsing and borrowing

1. Click on Borrowing and then on Find Books
2. The books from the people you can borrow from should show up. Most likely this will only be books from the FF community.
3. To ask to borrow, look at the right side under the stars.
4. These are the people who have a copy of the book, click on their avatar to request to borrow from them.

Once again if you have any other questions about the book sharing, please feel free to ask away on the forum thread or in the comments section.

As of writing, the FF community library has 27 copies of 25 books ranging from intellectual pleasures such as Breaking the Spell (Daniel Dennet) and Uncommon Sense (Alan Cromer) to the intriguing stories that facts can tell such as Microtrends (E. Kinney Zalesne, Mark Penn) and Freakonomics (Stephen J. Dubner, Steven D. Levitt). Also, big thanks to Terrence for making the first loan to me on the January 24 meetup of What the Dog Saw!

_{Post photograph by Or Hiltch}

Sunday, January 24, 2010
1:00pm – 4:00pm
Starbucks (near cinemas) at Shangrila Mall

Agenda:

* FF Podcast 2010 Episode 1

* Brainstorming for new FF contest

* Coordination meeting

** FF Film Fest on Feb 27
** FF Anniversary Party on Feb 28
** FF UP chapter and other university/college orgs

Date: Saturday, January 30, 2010 – 6pm

Venue: 2nd Flr. Harley Blvd. Motor Cafe
Juan Luna St., Davao City (opposite Better Components)
Tel. (082) 302-8986
Google Map coordinates: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=101543816664430507801.00046dc19acc8ec594a7e&ll=7.072348,125.615691&s

AGENDA:
- introductions/welcoming of new members
- initial planning for the First FF Davao Forum

CONTRIBUTION: None; pay for your own food and drinks (Harley offers the best burgers and they also serve rice and Filipino food)

Mulat Pinoy is a project by the Philippine Center for Population and Development (PCPD) and the Probe Media Foundation, Inc (PMFI) to spread awareness of population issues. They launched the site last Dec 19, and FF were actually invited to attend the launch event (thanks to an RH Bill related article in our site). Unfortunately, it coincided with the Winter Solstice party which is obviously more important than any population issue. Seriously though, we were invited the night before the event, so it was a bit too late to change the FF schedule.

And now, FF is invited to the Mulat Pinoy Kapihan Series. They’ve provided us the schedule and topics for the next 3 months:

2-4pm, Bo’s Coffee, Glorietta 5, Makati City

January 16 – Population and Environment
January 23 – Government Resources and Population Dynamics
January 30 – Population and Housing
February 13 – Population and Food Supply
February 27 – Population and Education
March 13 – Population and Health
March 27 – Urbanization/Migration
April 10 – Mulat Pinoy Synthesis

I was informed that presidential candidates Nick Perlas and JC Delos Reyes & his VP Dominador Chipeco will be attending this Saturday’s Kapihan Session on Population and Environment. If you’re scratching your head, wondering who they are (as I did), click on the links.

Thanks to Liwliwa Malabed for inviting the group!

Congratulations Igme, on winning our first ever Essay Writing Contest!

For those who were unable to attend the last meet-up, Igme was awarded for his article Children’s Choice. The decision was reached after factoring in the votes garnered, the original contest criteria and the fact that it was an actual essay (sorry, poets).

The prize, Dawkins’ The Greatest Show On Earth – The Evidence For Evolution, was awarded last Sunday, the 10th of January, in the year of His Noodliness, two thousand and ten.

Also handed out last Sunday was a surprise prize, for most valuable blogger, awarded to PinoyAtheist with 42 (forty two?!) posts! The purpose of this contest was to get members writing more about what it means to be a Filipino Freethinker, and for well after the contest period ended, John has been consistently writing about just that.

Two prizes awarded, two winners well deserved, one contest finally over. We can now start work on a second contest, in time for the first year anniversary of FF.

What contest would you join? What prize would you like to win?