• OPEN DISCUSSION - For the first 30 minutes of the Thursday night forums we will have informal open discussion. This will allow for late arrivals, food & drink ordering, and new attendees to become acclimated.
• ANNOUNCEMENTS - Any events, news, or other items that you feel are of interest to the group can be announced at the start of Free Inquiry Forum.

TOPICS for Thursday (5/12/05) & Monday (5/16/05):

1. Sarasota County and the Selby Foundation are sponsoring this year's Sarasota County One Book, One Community campaign. The selected book for the community to read is a nonfiction work entitled Mountains Beyond Mountains by Pulitzer-Prize winning author, Tracy Kidder. The book is about Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-educated doctor who sacrificed a lucrative physician's salary to devote his life to developing and building a health-care system for Haiti's poorest and sickest people. In fact, Farmer was able, working with extremely limited resources, to build a charity hospital in Haiti's central plateau, and successfully treat huge numbers of people (both in Haiti and in other parts of the world such as Mexico and the USSR) for multidrug-resistent tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. According to Kidder's book, Farmer "borrowed" large supplies of medicine and expensive medical supplies from Boston hospitals in order to treat poor patients in Haiti and elsewhere. He implies that Farmer felt the "rich" Americans wouldn't barely miss what he took and that basically the good he was doing justified the wrongs he was committing. Is it ever okay to steal? Do you believe that it's okay to commit a wrong or an evil in order to achieve a greater good? If so, who determines what is the greater good? Was the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima an example of committing a "lesser" evil to avoid a larger one? Kidder also implies in the book that Farmer manipulated the truth or outright lied sometimes to get funding for his projects. Is lying always bad? Is truthfulness something we should aspire to? On what occasion is it okay to lie? Should humans strive to be totally truthful no matter what the consequences -- even if it means someone's feelings are hurt or a child in Haiti has to die? (Submitted by MC)
2. OPEN DISCUSSION.

Quote of the week: "Being wrong is forgivable; claiming exclusive access to absolute truth is delusional."

TOPIC ARCHIVES

Subscribe to the Free Inquiry Forum mailing list to receive a weekly e-mail of discussion topics for each week. To subscribe to this list, send a plain text e-mail message to list@freeinquiryforum.com, which contains the following text in the first line of the message body:
SUBSCRIBE fif

Send your topic suggestions for an upcoming FiF to:

Please show your appreciation and support for the effort made to bring you Free Inquiry Forum by simply clicking on the tip cup below and entering an amount you would like to donate. THANKS!