---Background---
At the turn of the century, a group of students at the University of California at San Diego founded the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center - more commonly known as IDEA Center. What was originally a small club at that university alone eventually developed into an entirely new organization altogether.
Intelligent Design is a theory which holds that certain observable characteristics within the fields of cosmology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology are best explained as being the product of an intelligent cause and not the accident of blind/undirected processes.
To put it in simple terms: Intelligent Design is a damning concept that makes the outrageous suggestion that there might be more to life and the universe as a whole than just particle collision and matter/energy interactions - perhaps mind really did precede matter.
The purpose of IDEA Center was to encourage any willing persons to set up IDEA clubs. Within these you can discuss matters regarding various theories on origins and have a number of other benefits from IDEA Center staff as well (more on how that's been going later).
---This Blog's Purpose---
This blog is mean to serve as a kind of archival center for stuff related to an IDEA club that was originally approved in 2009. To be honest the "club" had been pretty sparse during the first few years it was even set up. It was really just an off and on kind of thing, until now.
As of just a few weeks ago, things have REALLY picked up in terms of club activity now that we finally have a surge in interest and a game plan for discussions and activities. The sky is really the limit now, and the momentum seems to be building up even more each week.
This blog will organize defenses of key ID books, as well as any other points of discussion we deem to be worth posting here. As time goes on, we hope this blog will help serve additional discussions outside the IDEA clubs that branch out from the one we started.
---How Cyber IDEA Works---
Now comes the real meat of this post. If someone has told you to read this to understand how an existing Cyber IDEA club or potential new one would work, here is the time to pay close attention.
Unlike most "clubs" that typically meet in person, most of what a Cyber IDEA club does involves discussions via email. That way they are private and don't require someone to publically reveal to the world wide web what their views on origins are (which is why Facebook is not recommended for any of this), but most of all these allow people to participate in the confort of their own home without having to show up at public meetings.
Sometimes we can meet in person once a month or so, or more if we like. But most of our discussions work by creating contact groups in our email accounts and/or email client apps. From there you just send an email to everyone in the group (which forms the club) as if you were having an email discussion with all of them at once. When new members join, you just add their email to the contact group and then they add existing member's emails to a group list on their email account.
This means that a wide variety of people can talk about various things related to Intelligent Design and go from there. So far it looks like discussions about books, blog posts, or videos are what will dominate most discussions. Planning subject matter can be done informally or it can be announced here if we want.
So far it's hard to say how many members will be in each "club" division. Whenever a discussion group reaches beyond a dozen people or so, it looks like we will just start a new group where a contact list can grow. No clue how many of these "listserv" style discussion groups will emerge, but the goal right now is to start at least a dozen active ones in the next five years.
More details about these club discussions will became available soon. In the meantime, whoever referred you to this post should be taken seriously. ;-)
