They can’t shut me up!

Tomorrow, Sunday, at 1:00 in the Roseville Library, I’ll be giving a talk on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. Come on down and argue with me!

Now I have to get back to polishing this talk up. I suppose no more than ten powerpoint slides of equations is the limit? (Nah, not really—there’s no math in this talk at all. A few pretty pictures, though…).

By the way, if you listened to the Horgan/Myers Show, there was an unfortunate characterization of atheist organizations as groups of people congratulating one another on how much smarter they are than those crazy theists. As you can see, we actually do have issues of substance to discuss, and it actually helps to talk about them in an explicitly non-supernatural way.

And as everyone knows, the backslapping chatter about our plans for world domination are confined to the business meeting.

Recruiting the local unbelievers

It’s never too early to start advertising: Skatje is starting up a new campus organization next fall, with another student, Collin Tierney, as co-chair. The group is called the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists – Morris Chapter, and if you’re an interested UMM student, they’d like you to join the facebook group at that link. The plan is to start the fall term with a respectable number of potential members, have weekly meetings, and develop a plan for education and outreach and just plain having fun.

I think Skatje and Collin are planning to have open meetings, so you don’t even have to be a student to show up.

Hooray! We’re getting less money!

Academia is a strange little world—we’re happy about this news!

The biggest winners from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting? The 1,900 students at the Morris campus who saw their tuition go down by almost $1,000.

We’re an even better bargain than before. Now we just need to get more students to take advantage of us…so enroll at the University of Minnesota Morris! Send your kids here!

Property values in St Paul just plummeted

In an unfortunate twist of fate for the former home of the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Church of Scientology is moving in.

The Church of Scientology has purchased the former Science Museum of Minnesota building in downtown St. Paul

Eric Rapp, a Welsh Cos. broker who marketed the space, said the church plans a major renovation of the building that once housed exhibits and has since been the home of the failed Minnesota Business Academy.

Rapp wouldn’t disclose the sale price of the 80,000-square-foot west building of the former museum complex. The sale closed Friday. A number of financial institutions had come to own the building, which was on the market since May 2006, he said.

It’s depressing, but the new building the Science Museum of Minnesota is in is wonderful, and you all ought to visit it. Skip the scientologists, though.

Sunday in the Park

The first of three potluck picnics sponsored by one of our regional godless groups is being held Sunday, 10 June, at noon, at Columbia Park—Skatje, my wife Mary, and I are planning on being there. Come on out and join the freethought community in the Twin Cities area!

By the way, it’s weird how we’ve got all of these infidel organizations here — the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists at the University of Minnesota, the Humanists of Minnesota, the Minnesota Atheists, and the Atheists for Human Rights (who in this case aren’t participating in the picnics). The Twin Cities has an embarrassment of riches, while the rural parts of the state are just embarrassingly pious. We have a few students who are going to try and start up a CASH chapter here in Morris next year, and we’ll see how well that goes—if there are any other atheist groups in outstate Minnesota, let me know…and if there are any lonely, isolated atheists scattered here and there (and I know there are), let me know that, too. We should try to build a wider community.