You can call this confab anything you want...

except "scientific."

BTW, I love the NYT's benign-spin titling of what is more or less a free-fire vent against religious belief.

Yeah, it's a "free for all" in exactly the same way what happened to Rodney King was a "free for all."

This quote pretty well sums it up:

“With a few notable exceptions,” he [anthropologist Melvin J. Konner] said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”