This is generally a good dinner party if you like intellectual conversation. I won't likely be there, as there is a conflict this month with an SF writers group I'm involved with.
From David Richards, who is an objectivist, I believe:
This Thursday May 10 is the second Thursday of the month, that means skeptics, humanists, atheists, Wiccans, Pagans, and intellectual outcasts of all kinds are once again meeting for dinner and social discourse!
Here is the location:
Hof’s Hut
4050 W. Chapman
Orange, CA 92868
(corner of Chapman and Lewis, right across the street from the Crystal Cathedral, which seems fitting)
convenient to the 5, 57, and 22 freeways
Menu entree items range from about $5 to $15. The time will be 7:30 to approx 9pm. When you arrive, ask for OC Skeptics, or just find your way to the lounge.
Ah, a woman after my own mind. No, NO! It's mine, I tell you.
Anyway.
I enjoy the company of people with whom I share fundamental values and a common philosophical base, of course. However, I do not feel at all threatened - except when it is actually rationally warranted, such as if I found myself in a clique of Al Quida members showing off their bomb designs - by engaging people with very different values and beliefs.
The local Skeptics dinner group usually has a couple or three objectivist types, and then several of the progressive left agnostics or atheists, but all well read and capable of carrying on a rational discourse on a high intellectual plane. Occasionally someone will invite a Christian or some other non-skeptical type to the meeting and often those are the best meetings, as we break out the heavy intellectual guns, and try to get below all the superficialities.
Another group locally that often breaks out in uncontrolled intellectual debate or discussion is the Orange County Science Fiction Club, which I attend religiously. Still another, surprisingly enough, is the Patrick Henry Club, which is ostensibly a "young democrats" group. However, they get some of the best speakers, videos, and discussions of any local group, and their reputation is such that major Democratic politicians frequently show up and seriously discuss issues in detail at their meetings, even though there are only perhaps fifty people attending.
And then, there are science fiction cons - not to be "con"fused with those silly Trekkie cons, the Creation cons, etc., or other cons based around some single TV show. More often than not, a real sf con will have you really wishing that it could have gone on for another month, as there are SO many brilliant and interesting people attending, as in major authors and real rocket scientists, just to name a couple examples.
