For the last two years, my church has co-sponsored Grab a Brew, Share Your View along with UNIFI, the freethinkers group at the University of Northern Iowa. GABSYV an open-mic event that we hold on the second Tuesday of every month. We choose a topic for the night, generally related to faith or philosophy, and then people share their ideas and opinions about it.

We started this event in April of 2007 and originally chose to hold it at a bar in Cedar Falls. Many people exist only for the moment and spend their lives ignoring the big questions, and if we can just get some of them to think—even if they completely disagree with us and what we stand for—then we are doing something good. (Bar patrons who wanted to spend their Tuesday evenings in peace have complained about us to the managers. That means they’re listening!) We share these goals with UNIFI.

We also disagree with each other about some very fundamental issues. UNIFI consists mostly of atheist/agnostics (and other “enthusiastic nonbelievers”) while Kaio consists of theologically-conservative Christians. Regardless of what topic we choose for discussion, it always drifts back to creation vs. evolution, the historical authenticity of the Bible, or the source of morality.

During the past two years, we have all come a long way in our understanding of each other. We at Kaio quickly noticed that real, live atheists are nothing like what you read about in Christian apologetics. The people in UNIFI realized that (some) Christians are nothing like what they read about in Dawkins or Harris. And we are all better off because of it.

However, Grab a Brew has gotten frustrating for me during this past year. I feel like everyone just recycles the same arguments. Often we’ll even come to a consensus on something one week, only to have someone bring it up again the next time as though we’d never talked about it, and we’ll have the same discussion all over again. There hasn’t been anything new.

Until last Tuesday.