And it’s a good one, too.

I was dismayed to read that MIT has decided, after a hundred years without, that it needs a chaplain.

MIT is about science and engineering and mathematics. There is no place for belief in those disciplines. Only doubt: we accept evidence but constantly test it.

Our students, especially the ones from America, have grown up in cultures saturated with religiosity. We should give them a little break from it while they’re here.

MIT needs religion like a bull needs mammaries.

Sincerely,

(Professor) Joe Haldeman

I have to take exception to that last line, though. I can think of many situations where male contributions to nursing would be useful. I don’t see that believing in baseless superstitions has any virtue at all in modern civilizations, so Haldeman is being too generous in his assessment.

Revere makes a bunch of good points in his Sunday Sermonette. One is the sheer insanity of current American politics:

Enlightenment thinking is taken for granted by modern Europeans, so it’s no surprise they are aghast when the leaders of a 21st century power think Divine Guidance is a good reason for exercising overwhelming power over its own and other peoples.

And another is the importance of secularism and reason in any Democratic nation.

Democracy without rationality — or in my terms, Enlightenment values — is a hollow promise, or worse, mob rule.

Religious values are intrinsically autocratic and irrational, relying on ignorance for their propagation, and are therefore anti-democratic.

It’s a little bit of an oversimplification of the history of atheism, but it’s funny anyway…and the diagram for religious history is also grossly simplified.

People have actually tried to argue to me that science is so complicated, but “god” is simpler and should be the preferred explanation…but isn’t “no god” even simpler than “god”?

Timothy Sandefur has an excellent quote from H.L. Mencken on how we ought to be responding to creationists.

This actual conflict is joined, and it is the height of absurdity for the…compromisers to seek to evade it with soft words. That conflict was not begun by science. It did not start with an invasion of the proper field of theological speculation by scientific raiders. It started with an invasion of the field of science by theological raiders. Now that it is on, it must be pressed vigorously from the scientific side, and without any flabby tenderness for theological susceptibilities. A defensive war is not enough; there must be a forthright onslaught upon the theological citadel, and every effort must be made to knock it down. For so long as it remains a stronghold, there will be no security for sound sense among us, and little for common decency. So long as it may be used as a recruiting-station and rallying-point for the rabble, science will have to submit to incessant forays, and the same forays will be directed against every sort of rational religion. The latter danger is not unobserved by the more enlightened theologians. They are well aware that, facing the Fundamentalists, they must either destroy or be destroyed. It is to be hoped that men of science will perceive the same plain fact, and so give over their vain effort to stay the enemy with weasel words.

Mencken sure was right — his prediction came true. It’s the 21st century. Let’s finally get around to demolishing the old superstitions.

Darn it, here’s the atheist problem: we’re not easily commercialized, with nothing for the corporate world to sink their hooks into. Someone has noticed.

Look for atheist perfume and you’ll be looking for eternity. You won’t find the works of Bertrand Russell packaged like the latest issue of Self or Cosmo, as the publishing company Thomas Nelson does with the Bible. (“Becoming is the complete New Testament in magazine format, but it wouldn’t be a culture ‘zine if it didn’t address men, beauty, fitness and food!”) Look for the atheist equivalent to Christian yo-yos and Christian neckties and you will come up as empty-handed as Mother Teresa passing the plate at Christopher Hitchens’ dinner table.

No doubt the thought of atheist lip balm and atheist jelly beans is hard to reconcile for many freethinkers–one of the virtues of atheism is that not every aspect of one’s life has to be yoked to some clingy deity who feels totally left out if you don’t include Him in everything you do. Plus, there’s simply the logical disconnect: What do jelly beans have to do with atheism? Why not stick with books, rational arguments, reason?

I guess we need a money angle to line up the capitalists to back us up. Hmmm. Can we market some plastic bubble packaging containing a vacuum as an action figure?