Blog about the (Insert Family Name of Outrageously Wealthy Individual Here) Symposium

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend one session at the Brown Symposium due to the fact that I judged in a debate tournament on Friday and Saturday and had to drive home on Thursday. I actually only stayed in town long enough to meet with the GLCA New York Arts Program representative, who was holding an information session on Friday which I was unable to attend but kindly agreed to meet with me. But anyway, I digress from the Brown Symposium lecture.

I attended the first Brown Symposium event held at 9:30 a.m. Thursday morning. Baylor professors of sociology, Dr. Christopher Bader and Dr. Paul Froese, gave my talk entitled, “Images of God and Views on Science: Findings from the Baylor Religion Survey.” I was pleasantly surprised by the talk. I was expecting to be bored out of my mind and to leave immediately as soon as they opened the floor for questions. But, I had obviously chosen a good talk to attend because these guys knew how to keep an audience interested and involved.

One particular part of the talk that I found interesting was the section where they had audience members verbally shout out their reactions, using descriptive adjectives, to different images of God shown on the screen. I was reminded of the scene from The Da Vinci Code (2006) in which Tom Hanks’ character is giving a lecture over his book and he asks people to shout out what the picture makes them think of. I feel that this activity gives the audience a general insight into who the person doing the shouting might be. Maybe this is due to the fact that I believe in the power of words, semantics, over people and I study this almost every day as it represents one of my areas of concentration in my college education. Most interesting to me is that when I tried to visualize what God might look like, I couldn’t see a specific face. Later on in the talk I would find out that this is not an uncommon occurrence.

The most intriguing part of the talk, for me, was when they passed out the small “God Questionnaire” to the members of the audience. I scored in the low range for both categories, God’s Judgment and God’s Engagement scores. This made my God a Type D God, or a distant view of God in which I refer to God not as a He, but as a Force that is above the affairs of this world (paraphrased from slideshow). My view of a less-engaged God, as they stated, says that I would believe that God set the natural world in motion, but has not since interfered with worldly affairs. I think this is very interesting in terms of our cohort’s topic because this hinges on how each and every one of us (atheist and religious, alike) come to understand the world.

I liked that they kept their talk short, because any time someone is talking in front of a large audience, that isn’t forced to listen, it is hard to keep their attention focused for very long periods of time. I also loved the questions at the end of the session, as they came from all different directions in terms of where individuals sat on the science/religion line. This was my first Brown Symposium lecture (no, I didn’t go last year), but I most definitely do not plan on it being my last.

My best wishes,
Brady