Jason Rennie interviewed me for the Sci Phi podcast, and now you can listen to me babble about religion and science. I have got to do something about my office phone, though — the sound quality is terrible, and I’ve gotten the same complaint from others.

Or maybe that’s what I actually sound like, with a staticky hiss and the occasional feedback ringing. That would be kind of cool. It would almost make up for my mild manner.

Looking for some ungodly inspiration? Here are some possibilities:

• Revere optimistically sees atheism as becoming mainstream. I think this is the virtue of the open and aggressive discussions about atheism going on — there are more freethinkers out there than polls reveal, and they are silent because of the oppression of the majority. We are demolishing the societal avoidance of considering atheism; the goal isn’t exactly evangelical, since I don’t think we’re necessarily “converting” people, but more a matter of giving people the freedom to reject gods.

• It’s time for the Carnival of the Godless #66. 600 more, and we launch the Apocalypse.

• Richard Dawkins has assembled some succinct rebuttals to criticisms of The God Delusion. I particularly liked his response to the claim that “people need religion”. No, they do not. I don’t, Dawkins doesn’t—and it’s not as if we are weird mutants. You could say that people need stories, people need reconciliation, people need consonance with their world, and religion tries to provide those things…but the message we need to get across is that religion is a flawed, illusory, and erroneous strategy for providing for human needs, and we can do better.

• The Paszkiewicz/LaClair case has been settled. No blame was attached to either side, but the settlement does make it clear that teaching Biblical superstition as history is not to be permitted, so it’s an implicit rebuke, although Paszkiewicz still gets off scot-free.

Quick, listen to this realaudio talk by Mark Steel on Thomas Paine while it’s still available on the BBC site. It’s both hysterically funny and informative. One revelation for me was that America’s early fervently godless rabble-rouser began his career by signing on to a ship called the Terrible, under Captain Death, and also sailed as a privateer. I tell you, there’s a mystic connection between atheists and pirates!

Nicole Smalkowski, the young woman discriminated against because she is an atheist, was in the news again on Friday. She was interviewed by John Stossel (who is a colossal douche) for 20/20 and a story about disbelief in America. Stossel makes much of the fact that atheists are a minority and that this is a “Christian nation”, but no matter how smarmy he gets, the sincerity of the Smalkowski family and the injustice of Nicole‘s situation comes through loud and clear.

If you missed the broadcast like I did, have no fear, Norm comes through: it’s available at onegoodmove.

We usually called places like Hardesty, Oklahoma “small town America”, but I think we have to rephrase that to “small mind America.” What Nicole really needs to do is hang tough for a little longer and get away to an open-minded university—they’re everywhere, and there she’ll find a community of people who think unbelief is just fine (one reason going to college erodes faith isn’t just that students get smarter—finding out that you don’t have to believe in nonsense to be a good person and that you can be accepted socially if you don’t go to church every Sunday can be very liberating). I can vouch for Minnesota’s Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists organization as a very welcoming group — I’ll be their faculty advisor in the coming year, and we’re planning to start a chapter here at my campus this fall (and my campus has an American Indian tuition waver, by the way, encourages participation in sports, has a lively music program, has excellent academic standards, and is set in a very low stress small town environment. Hint, hint. I’d love to see more rural Americans getting enlightened at universities and returning to their communities to open those tight and puckered minds.)

Next week, the Humanists of Minnesota are having their annual banquet and fundraiser. You should all go! It’s at the Doubletree Hotel, 1500 Park Place Boulevard, in St Louis Park, at 6:00 on 19 May. Tickets are $37.

Here! A flyer and ticket order form!

The featured speaker at the dinner is, umm, me, but don’t let that put you off, there will be lots of opportunity to converse with your fellow freethinkers. There is a kind of generic title for the talk that was invented way back when I was first invited, “Evolution, the Web and Freethought,” but I’m not actually going to say much about the web — instead, I’m going to talk a bit about the “new” atheism (which isn’t really new at all), and why scientists are suddenly getting so assertive, and how evolution is central to the erosion of religion.

It should be fun. If you want to come to heckle and throw tomatoes, that’s good, too…as long as you cough up some cash for the Humanists of Minnesota.