O_O

As I said, last night I sent an email to Dr. Tyson's people inquiring about what it would take to get him here. 

This morning, I had a reply.

Not from Dr. Tyson-- I didn't expect he would see the message anyway-- but from the person who books his speaking engagements. He gave me his phone number and said I ought to call, he could answer my questions. I freaked out about that for a while-- I hate phones, and when it comes to contacting important people, I much prefer to have the time to compose my thoughts and agonize over my phrasing that email allows. But I did so.

It costs $40,000 to get Dr. Tyson to speak. 

Plus first class travel and expenses, of course. 

And the scary thing? We're actually going to try to make it happen.

Dr. Tyson is booked until next year, what with filming the new Cosmos series. In general, it's best to try to book him very far in advance anyway, I am told, because he gets hundreds of requests a year and can only do so many of them. So the fact that we had said spring at the earliest is actually fairly convenient. In fact, Dr. Tyson has an engagement in California on May 1, so if we wanted to book him the day before or after, it would cut down on travel costs. 

A couple of things make the very large number slightly less scary. Only half of it is due at the time the contract is signed, and even that might not be set in stone-- some schools, I am told, have a policy against paying advances. Mines is one such school, but they make exceptions for cases where it is industry standard to do so, so I'm not sure whether we will have to or not. The rest of the money-- or all of it, possibly-- is due the day after the event.

That's where the other one comes in: ticket sales. Our largest venue on campus seats 1100. I wish we had a larger-- it will be no trouble to sell that out completely. But if I set the ticket price at $20, that will cover more than half. And if I set it at $25... I don't want to set them that high, but I think I could. (Yes, $40 tickets would probably cover everything. I don't want to set the price that high-- I want students to be able to afford to go.)

However, as confident as I am of selling out our auditorium, I know I should not count on that money. Besides, it would be much better to have the ticket sale money to use for the future-- so I'm left with trying to raise $40,000. 

But like I said, the scary thing is that we're going to try. How amazing would that be? Not only being able to meet one of my idols, more personally because I'm an organizer for the event, but also the message it would send. A brand new group, able to raise that kind of money and get one of the most recognized scientists alive to come to our campus-- I wonder how much the Campus Crusade for Christ has ever raised for one thing? And if we can get the full amount before, we'd have $22,000 (or more!) to use for charitable donations and service. How much has the Fellowship of Catholic University Students ever donated in one big chunk? It's a petty, selfish sort of glee to think about being able to top those two-- among others-- in our first year of existence. 

By the way, if you have fundraising suggestions-- preferably ones that bring in a lot of money-- please offer them in the comments... we're going to need all the help we can get!

Yay, productivity!

Today was an awesome day.

I met with my officers today, and we discussed at great length the feedback we got from the brainstorming session last week. We made a lot of decisions, in terms of what we need to be doing before fall. In mostly chronological order:

We are going to have my VP talk to Phil Plait about speaking for us this fall. He has already offered to come speak to the astronomy club (that my VP is president of) for free, so we think this will not be too hard a sell. He will, we hope, be our big name speaker for the fall. We also decided there was no harm in trying to find out about getting Neil DeGrasse Tyson for the spring. I wrote an email to the "Request a Speaking Engagement" address on his website this evening, asking for information about bringing him in in the spring. Here's hoping!

The first big event we are concerned with is the Celebration of Mines, our fall club fair. I've ordered tabling supplies from the SSA, found a link about buying Darwin fish and other things in bulk, emailed the RDF about buying Out Campaign stuff in bulk, and my treasurer is going to talk to the person in charge of such things tomorrow to be sure we have a booth space reserved. We decided that instead of having people write their name and email on a list, we'll have them type it into a spreadsheet on my tablet-- no handwriting issues, and my tablet has enough battery to last through the day with no problems. We'd like to have event cards to give out-- that is, an index card or smaller sized thing that has information for the next event we are doing. We also talked about having people fill out surveys so we can get a better feel for the campus's attitudes, and about having some sort of game for giving away swag. We're not yet sure what we will do to attract attention, but we'll put some thought into it.

We talked for a while about other events-- debates we could host, movie nights, getting a group together to go to the Reason Rally next year-- and then moved onto service. We love the idea of helping with Jeffco's Outdoor Lab program, and reaching out to the Girl Scouts (but NOT the Boy Scouts-- they allow neither gays nor atheists). In the nearer future, we'd like to help clean the campus-- pick up trash, mostly-- and donate to the food bank, or a similar organization. Those are simple things to get started in, and if we're going to reach Tier 3, we have to do at least 3 service events a year.

Then we moved onto education, and started talking about my VP's pet project. He wants to collect videos of people talking about how they came to be atheist/agnostic/humanist/whatever label they wear, and put them online somehow. It's rather nebulous at this point, but this does make it very convenient that our faculty adviser is also in charge of the AV Club. I decided to find out about what it might cost to get a more professional website set up; a friend is researching that for me now.

Fundraising is always a challenge; we have decided that our big event is going to be an annual Flying Spaghetti Monster Dinner. Buy a plate, get spaghetti and a raffle ticket (more raffle tickets can be purchased at an additional cost) and some kind of entertainment. Servers will dress as pirates, naturally. We're thinking this should happen in November; we've already decided that there will be a committee for it.

Finally we talked about other groups we could cooperate with. Sigma Lambda (the local GLBT group) came up again, as well as APO-- I am told they do a lot of philanthropy, and would be happy to work with us. We also talked about gradually taking over the newspaper-- apparently a few years ago they were all super conservative and Christian. This has improved, but it's about time we got another voice in the paper.

As the meeting wound down and we talked about committees, we got a little silly. The committees would all have excessive names:
- Fundraising: There's Always Money in the Banana Stand Committee
- FSM Dinner: The Committee Touched By His Noodly Appendage
- Outreach: Really, We Don't Eat Babies
- Events: Cool People Doing Cool Things
- Planning: Hindsight Is 20/20, Foresight Should Be 20/20
- Executive (officers): Committee for Investigation of Recursive Committees

Then we made a to-do list, which I have already made a good start on. All in all, a very productive day.

Another week, another SSA event...

Today we had another SSA meeting, and this time we asked Dr. Shorey to speak. Dr. Shorey is probably my favorite professor I have had thus far at Mines. He teaches one of the core classes, Earth and Environmental systems, and so most students have had him at one point or another. Apparently they had another professor do it one year, and there was enough of a public outcry that Shorey returned. His class is extremely easy-- not because of the subject matter, but because of the way he teaches. He has pre-written objectives, from which all the test questions will be pulled, so you know what you need to take notes on and what you need to study. And he has a podcast of every subject he covers in the class, in case you have to miss for some reason. But mostly, he's awesome because he is very, very enthusiastic.

When we started talking about this group, someone mentioned that they had been talking to him about being a faculty advisor, and I was a little surprised-- in one of his podcasts (specifically the one on evolution) he states that he is a christian. Apparently that is out of date; he was very keen to help us get started, and he has connections and all kinds of useful things to offer.

Today he spoke about religion. He began by declaring himself an agnostic secular humanist, which he then defined: agnostic because he doesn't know about afterlife or the supernatural, secular because if he doesn't know, he's not going to make decisions based upon those things, and humanist because to him, the most important thing is the survival and well-being of the human race. I rather like that definition, as well as that label. He then spoke about what he called the elephant in the room-- religion. Apparently the word comes from two cells, "re," meaning back, and "ligio," meaning tied to. So religion, based on this, is something that ties us back. To what? Dr. Shorey stated that he believes it ties us back to each other, to a belief that we are all connected and important in some way.

He spoke then about myths-- he is fond of the hindu myth regarding the face of glory, and fond of myths in general, and in that, I agree. He says that he certainly does not believe them to be true, but that there is worth in them anyway. Then he talked about the anthropic principle a bit, and I think he was a little too soft on the idea of the strong anthropic principle. (The weak anthropic principle states that of course the universe is "fine-tuned" for life; if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it. The strong anthropic principle involves the idea that we are necessary for the universe to exist or continue existing, which I find rather silly.)

Then he talked about whether science and religion were compatible, and here is where I disagree with him. He didn't come out and say it, but he appeared to support the idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA. What NOMA states is that science answers one kind of quesiton, and religion another, and they therefore can coexist as long as they don't try to deal with the other's subject matter. I disagree. For one, religion seems to step into science's domain, if you want to think of them as separate, all the time. Fundamentalists especially want to step in and say that science is wrong, but really, all of them do it. They believe prayer can heal, and they believe miracles can break the laws of physics, and they want to define where life begins for their own morality's sake. And yet when science tries to step into their domain-- that's intolerance!

It goes deeper than that-- what IS the domain of religion, exactly? It used to be that it spoke on everything from the causes of the weather to dietary restrictions. Now we know better-- that's science's domain now. Religion can talk about an afterlife... sure. Science cannot yet say whether there is any point to that. I think the presence of a soul-- a non-physical, animating thing which makes us who we are-- is absolutely a scientific question, and that it doesn't look terribly good for the supernatural claims at this point. Does religion dictate morality? HELL no. As they say, it takes religion to make a good man do evil things. Should science dictate morality? It's got a much better angle on it, as far as I am concerned.

But at the core, the problem is that the very basis of all science and the basis of all religion are at odds, as far as I can tell. Religion asks that you believe, without proof-- the more you believe, the "better" you are. Science asks that you put every hypothesis to the test. The less you believe, without evidence, the better a scientist you are. And the religious reliance on faith, on believing in spite of evidence, is, I think, harmful to the human race. It teaches people NOT to hold their ideas up to examination. It teaches people that "I don't know" means "god did it," rather than "let's find out."

In any case, I very strongly disagree with the idea of NOMA. Other than that, though, today's meeting went very well, and Dr. Shorey filmed his talk, so hopefully I'll be able to share it soon. For the moment, I need to head to bed, it's been a long day and I've a long weekend ahead of me.

Intolerance for Tolerance

I've been arguing on facebook a lot lately. But I really didn't think that posting this was going to start one:

I mean, really, that doesn't seem like something that would start an argument. I even had a Christian friend weigh in on it:

"If I were truely religious I would look at it from the terms of sacraficing yourself for your child. I would still take the drug regardless of religious beliefs. Take the drug, save the child. Besides in the end if there truely is God (or whomever/whatever is important in your religion) then he or she may understand and save you anyways. Your child will have a life and will be able to live. You will still live but just a different life as far as you're aware. People aren't always smart. One thing the church does teach and that is that we are all flawed in some way. We can do good things but we are also sinners. If taking the drug in order to save the child is a sin then I guess I would be a sinner. Whomever wrote the comment below is not a good person in my mind. There are some good Christians and some bad Christians."

But then a 'friend' of mine steps in, and has this to say: 

"Well to be fair, if you set someone up like that, paint them into a corner KNOWING what they believe in advance..."

I don't see how it's a set up, and thus, we start arguing. My point is that someone stating that they would not only sacrifice their child's life for their beliefs, but that they consider it a moral action to do so, is horrifying. His point seems to be that any criticism of another's beliefs is intolerance, and therefore not okay.

Between this friend and my mom, I seem to be doomed to be forever defending myself against extreme tolerance. Yes, everyone should have the right to believe however they please, and in an ideal world, their beliefs wouldn't have any impact on me. However, some people insist on making decisions for others based on their own personal beliefs-- I do not see how accepting this behavior is in line with the idea that people should be allowed to believe whatever they want. "Believe whatever you want... but it offends my belief if you want to get an abortion." Not okay. 

I'm honestly not sure why I haven't unfriended this guy. He annoys the crap out of me at least 90% of the time. 

Ask An Atheist Day! (Part 2)

Today was Ask An Atheist day, as I mentioned in yesterday's post. It began, for me, last night, when I posted about it on facebook and invited people to ask me anything. What an interesting experience!

I had a few people ask sincere, curious questions, which are nice, and often lead to good conversations. In fact, most of the questions I was asked led to good conversations, actually. I did have some flippant questions-- my favorite being a fellow atheist asking, grinning from ear to ear, how we explain the banana. If you've not heard it, there's a very silly creationist argument that says the banana is so perfectly designed for human consumption that it must have had a creator. Which it does-- man. The banana, in its original form, is nigh inedible; through careful, directed breeding, it became the sweet, seedless fruit we know today.

But mostly I had some very good conversations, starting in a chatroom last night with a friend asking me sincerely about my beliefs. I don't recall all of the questions, but they were good ones, and it was a good opportunity to hone my answers for the challenges that came later.

When I posted to facebook, I began getting questions almost immediately, but the interesting ones started this morning. It turns out one of my facebook friends, who has a PhD in physics, is a young earth creationist. He believes that evolution would violate the second law of thermodynamics, and thus is impossible. He also believes that the laws of physics do not allow the earth or the universe to be as old as scientists claim. He posted in great detail, and so I took time to address each of his points, doing my best to remain polite (even though I kind of wanted to scream). In the end, he thanked me for my replies, and bowed out of the discussion-- I count that as a win.

Then, of course, there was the table today. I got there at eleven to begin setting up, though we were scheduled to begin at noon. We were already collecting people's contact information and answering questions by 11:45, and while there was some down time, we had a very successful day. Got the word out about the group, had a lot of people thank us for starting it, even had one guy take a picture of us and post it on reddit-- go upvote us!

Then, of course, there were the conversations, many of them with Christians. I was in class when a bible study group came by and offered printed out bible verses, which makes me a little sad, that would have been fun. But I was there when two Catholics came by a little later. The girl began by asking "Who created you?" in a somewhat mocking tone, so I gave her a flippant answer-- my parents. She kept asking "Who created them?" so I kept answering "Their parents" until someone stepped in and started talking with her about the origins of life. At this point her companion had a question of his own, so I stopped paying attention to her for a bit, but she eventually asked about saints whose bodies were supposedly perfectly preserved (we looked them up and found that they were not, and that there were perfectly legitimate reasons for the imperfect preservation that was present), that she claimed had been examined by "atheist scientists" who found no scientific reason, which meant it had to be a miracle.

At this point her companion and I were talking about martyrs. His question was simply "What about all the people who have died for God? Why would they do that if God wasn't real?" I told him that it made perfect sense for them to die for something if they believed in it, to which he replied that they wouldn't believe in it that much if it were fake. So I asked him about people who had died for things he didn't believe in... he didn't have a reply to that, and after that, the conversation was much less confrontational, and we started talking about the meaning of life, and other such philosophical quandaries. By the time he left, he seemed very thoughtful. They were both very friendly-- everyone I spoke to today was.

All in all, it was a very good day, and I am very glad that we did this.

Ask An Atheist Day!

Tomorrow (4/19) is National Ask An Atheist Day. There are a lot of misunderstandings about what atheists are, what they believe, and why, and this event is an attempt to correct that.

To use a personal example, here are some quotes from a conversation I have been having recently on facebook:

• ...while Atheism/Naturalism cannot fully fit the description of a religion (which is a word of considerable vagueness) it does rise to the level of a Quasi-religious worldview, postulating answers to the questions: Is there a God? How should we live? Is there life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? And the answers it gives are not based on conclusive reasoning, but require a faith in that particular worldview because reason is itself a matter of faith.
• The only response to ... Atheism would be a meaningless madness, deadening apathy, and suicidal insanity. 
• Now, if I was less consistent in my Atheism, I could try to sneak in some things which would allow for more sanity, joy, and hope in life. I could claim that Reason was reliable in spite of the lack of support and even contradictions to the consequences of starting from a materialist philosophy. I could claim that relationships matter. I could borrow ideas of order and objective truth and infuse them into my claims about the universe. All inconsistent with my Atheism, but who cares?
• If there is no God then evidence suggests that I have no reason to believe in reason, morality, free will, the veracity of my experiences or anything else.
• I know you say you wonder at the universe... But I live in a wonder-filled one.
• "The believer is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." It seems obvious to me which are the free thinkers.

... the whole conversation has been incredibly frustrating, starting with his ideas of what an atheist really is (in spite of him not being an atheist himself). It frustrates me that everyone has their own idea of what it means when I say that I'm an atheist... and that they often do not listen when I correct them. Theists-- that is, people who are not atheists-- have some really odd ideas about what it means to be an atheist, and some even stranger ones about what it implies. 

In any case, for the entirety of the day, I'll answer any questions I am asked-- preferably about atheism, but silly questions are fun, too. We're setting up a table in the student center on campus tomorrow, hopefully we'll get a lot of interest, answer some good questions, start some good conversations.

And actually, as long as this blog post is up, I'll answer questions in the comments, too. :)

"I had no need of that hypothesis"

The above is what Pierre-Simon Laplace said to Napoleon when asked why his book on astronomy, unlike Newton's contained no mention of god. Newton had seen that his calculations were not entirely accurate, and had decided that what kept the planets from careening out of place was the hand of god. Laplace made some corrections, and was able to explain celestial motion without resorting to the supernatural.

I think that quote-- "I had no need of that hypothesis"-- is an important one. The more we learn about the universe, the less we need the supernatural to explain anything. There was a time when we did not understand much, and at that time, gods arose. What caused the lightning, or the rain, or the lack of it? An angry god, punishing the wicked. Likewise, favorable weather was caused by a happy god. Appease god, and things will go well. We know now about pressure systems and how weather works; we no longer have need of that hypothesis. Before Darwin, we had no idea how life came to be, in its many and varied forms. It was reasonable, then, that people believed god had made all the plants and animals, shaped them as an artist might. But Darwin saw a more reasonable way it could have happened; following the natural laws of the universe, life could have evolved to the state in which we now know it. And again, we now had a natural explanation, and have no more need of the god hypothesis. It is no longer reasonable to think that god did it, any more than it is reasonable to believe god causes the weather. We know how life came to be in its present form; we have no need of god.

As science advances, the need for god retreats. What once was seen as the vagaries of an all-powerful deity is now known to be simple cause and effect. It was, I think, simple cause and effect that led me to reject the idea of god. When you pray for something, and it happens, where, exactly, did god step in to give it to you? Say you prayed for a parking spot-- I know plenty of people that pray for that very thing, and other inanities. When you get to the store, there is a spot right up close-- your prayer was answered! But where did god come in? You left the house at such a time that when you arrived, someone else had just left. They left because they had an appointment to get to. That appointment had been set a week before, long before you prayed for that parking spot. Every effect has a cause, traceable by the laws of nature. Where is the need for god?

Some might say that god 'inspired' them to leave the house at the precise time they needed in order to get that parking spot, or 'inspired' the other person to leave at that time, but that falls apart too, if you think about it. Everything you did that day, including your thoughts, had a physical cause. We do not yet fully understand how the brain works, but we do know that thoughts are physical, chemical reactions in the brain. There is no need for a divine finger in your grey matter; you had that thought as a result of what came before.

So there is no need for a god in our day-to-day lives-- and, in fact, god cannot exist there. Everything follows physical laws. A miracle, were one to occur, would break those laws... but there is no evidence of anything breaking them, ever. There are no miracles that have been verified by science as having happened.

What about creation? Well, Darwin put paid to god creating life as it now exists. Abiogenesis-- that is, what sparked life in the first place-- is another matter... but given everything that we now know, it seems silly to simply say "god did it" when we could instead work on the problem and try to find out. And scientists are doing just that. There is no reason to believe that this one thing required a divine touch, when everything else can be explained by science.

And I do mean everything. We know how the planet formed, how stars and galaxies form. We've even got a pretty good handle on the Big Bang. We don't know exactly what sparked it... but there is reason to believe that we do not need a god, even there. I have just enough of a handle on the physics to put it very simply; I don't know it in great detail, but it is an explanation I got from Stephen Hawking, and I know just enough to find it reasonable. The universe, at the moment of the Big Bang, was infinitely small-- small enough, in fact, that it falls into the realm of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a linear sort of existence; they pop in and out of existence, for lack of a better term, all the time. It is therefore not inconceivable that the universe itself, at the time a quantum particle, could have simply popped into existence. No need for that hypothesis, indeed!

But it goes further than that; with what we know of the Big Bang, and of the universe, it seems there is no place for god, period. To begin with, you have to understand that time, like space, is a physical dimension. We exist in a universe of (at least) four dimensions, three spatial, one temporal. This is known as space-time. Space time, it has been proven, can be warped; the most stunning example is that of a black hole. If you were to fall into a black hole, and could somehow survive to observe what was happening around you, time would slow for you, and eventually come infinitely close to a stand-still; you could look out at the universe and see eons flying by. So, time is a physical dimension, contained within the universe, just like space. When the infant universe popped into existence, it contained time, as well as space. Therefore, before the Big Bang, there was no time. Asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North pole; it is a meaningless question.

Without time, without a before in which to exist, there could not have been a god before the universe that could have created it.

Some people will say that god is eternal, existing outside of time and space; such a god seems pointless to me. In order to influence the universe, whether by creating it, or life, or by intervening in people's day to day lives, god must be part of the universe. If god is part of the universe, then he is bound by the laws of nature (having been created by the Big Bang himself), and cannot violate them, and he cannot have existed before the Big Bang to do any sort of cosmic on-switching. If god is outside the universe, he cannot influence it.

There is just barely room, if you wish to see it this way, for the deist god. It is possible that, in whatever existed before the universe, whatever currently exists outside the universe, there was a being who could have caused the particle-universe to pop into existence. Such a being is not known to have ever influenced anything inside the universe, and so in my mind, speculating about its existence is meaningless. We can only know the universe, at least so far in our understanding. Who knows? Maybe someday we'll reach outside that boundary, beyond what we now know as existence, and find something else there. Since we cannot assume that what lies outside the universe obeys the same natural laws, I suppose things found there could be called "supernatural." Somehow, I think that kind of supernatural would not be very satisfying to many theists.

Huzzah!

Well, today's meeting was a rousing success. We had roughly thirty-five people show up, none of whom left after grabbing a slice of pizza.

Naturally, I was nervous. In fact I spend twenty of the last thirty minutes leading up to the meeting freaking out, walking off nervous energy and telling myself it was silly to worry that we would only have three people, we had at least nine, from last Tuesday's meeting. It was also silly, I tried telling myself, to worry that I was either going to bore or offend every person that did show up. But telling myself something doesn't make me believe it.

Of course, when I got back to the lecture hall ten minutes before the meeting and found well over a dozen people already seated, most of those fears melted away. Not so for my treasurer, who apparently was worried a crazy fundamentalist was going to take advantage of their new right to conceal carry on campus and express their opinion of us with bullets. But then, he's from Texas, that's to be expected.

I'm going to be honest; it made me kind of happy when a person from the "Progressive Religious Orediggers" (who are associated with a local unitarian church) said she wanted to associate with us... and also said that she had practically no student interest. I'll be good, and we'll work with them, but it made me a little happy that my group was doing better.

I had two people immediately volunteer to be secretary, just after the meeting, and there was a lot of interest in another general meeting, so we've scheduled one two weeks from today, same time, same place. We think we're going to see if there's a faculty member or local speaker we can bring in. And there was a lot of interest in the Ask An Atheist table as well, for next Thursday. I've got some things to do on Orgsync, following today's meeting.

On top of all of that, we ended up with just about the perfect amount of pizza.

Everything really came together today-- on a personal note, I got registered, so I'm not worried about that anymore, and now I can focus on studying for my next physics exam, on Tuesday. But mostly for the group. Everything went really well, and I couldn't be happier.

It's (almost) official!

On Thursday, I and a couple others from my group met with Dr. Shorey, who was interested in being our faculty advisor. Dr. Shorey is probably my favorite professor that I have yet met at Mines. He's a paleoclimatologist who teaches in the Geology department, and I am so fond of his teaching method that I went out of my way to have him again this semester. He uploads all his lecture powerpoints to his website-- but a lot of professors do that. He also has a podcast series for every topic he lectures on-- if you miss a class, you can go and listen to the lecture. Best of all, he has a list of objectives for every subject, things that might apper on the test. He talks a lot about things that are not objectives, and many of these things are fascinating, but having the objectives makes note-taking and studying vastly easier. But none of these are why I like him so much. I like him because he is incredibly enthusiastic about what he does. I love it.

So Dr. Shorey was interested in being our advisor. He runs the AV club, offered to help us do podcasts, or take videos of speakers to share. He has some great ideas about speakers and discussions we can have. He brought the same enthusiasm to us that he brings to the classroom. This makes me very happy; having a faculty advisor who is so enthusiastic and so on board will make this all very much easier. So we got him to sign our paperwork, and I turned it in that afternoon.

Less than an hour later I had an email to set up our orgsync page. Orgsync is the website that all student groups are encouraged to use for organization, scheduling, and such. I got it set up, created events for our upcoming meeting and for Ask An Atheist Day, invited all the group members for which I had contact info. I also set up a twitter account for us (@SSACSM), and through orgsync, set up a website.

We will hopefully be made official on tuesday, that being the next time the student board meets, and they need to approve our application. I submitted the application to officially affiliate with the SSA, with a note that we were not yet official but would be, soon. We've got the lecture hall reserved for our introductory meeting on Thursday, and fliers are up advertising it. I've been working on my presentation/talk for that meeting. I've also found out who I need to talk to in order to set up a table for Ask An Atheist Day.

I said it before, but I will say it again: here we go!

Here we go!

Well, it's official.

Almost, anyway.

Today I finally met the elusive Matt, and collapsed his wave-function most favorably indeed. Cats have been herded, we got all the student signatures we need, our by-laws are ready except for our statement of purpose (which will be done within a couple of days), we've got a faculty adviser who just needs to sign the form, and we have a President, Vice President, and Treasurer already in place. (I am that president, by the way, a fact which pleases me even though I know it'll make life busy as hell next year.) We even have our first TWO things planned!

We are going to be an officially branded affiliate of the SSA, bearing the name "Secular Student Alliance at the Colorado School of Mines" or "SSACSM" if we are being lazy. Huzzah for support from a national organization. We decided today that, whether we have ourselves made official by the school yet or not, we would like to have an informational meeting on Thursday, April 12. There will be pizza (our new VP offered to buy it) and I'll be talking for a few minutes about who we are and why we exist and what we want to do.

A week later is National Ask An Atheist Day. Since we've already got one thing going, we figured, why not do another? Get us some visibility, grow our membership. (Did I mention that the SSA will give me business cards? Not really related to the current topic, I'm just excited about it.) We're going to set up a table, either in the student center or the big field where people hang out, depending on the weather, with SSA banners and stuff and a big sign that says "Atheists! Ask Away!" Should be fun.

In the mean time, I've got to make sure the by-laws are good, come up with a mission statement we can agree on, create a powerpoint and write some sort of presentation for that first meeting, ask whether the Meyer Hall lecture hall is open at the time we want, meet with Dr. Young for his signature, get all the paperwork into the Student Activities office, and ask a few important questions there, approve a flier that has not been created yet for posting, help post fliers... and maintain my grades, of course.

I do believe I'm about to be busier than I have ever been before.

Bring it on.

James the Amazing Randi

So, I met James Randi today.

You know, James Randi, of the James Randi Educational Foundation and the Million Dollar Prize? Yeah, that James Randi.

The Auraria Campus Atheists hosted a Pseudoscience Fair today. They had people presenting on all sorts of things, from conspiracy theories to ionizing foot baths. They each set up a table, like at a science fair. One person had re-created Emily Rosa's therapeutic touch experiment, and would take new data from anyone who came to the table. One guy-- who took second place-- had set up a presentation about homeopathic "beer" (he had to use root beer, since it was on a college campus), which had no calories, no alcohol, left you with no hangover, and did not impair your driving! (For those who don't get the joke, read up a little on homeopathy, which James Randi later named as one of the most dangerous instances of pseudoscience in America today.) The winners had set up a display with a bunch of methods used to contact the dead, with an explanation (in fact, the same explanation) of what actually happened. They also had the most fantastically neon green ties I have ever seen.

(On a side note, I met the Regional Coordinator for the Colorado Regional Secular Student Alliance. Nate told him he thinks I am the most enthusiastic of the Mines people, and that he is therefore backing my "candidacy." It amused me.)

Randi himself judged the projects, and then after he had eaten dinner, he got up and gave a talk. It's hard to describe it, really-- like any 82 year old man, he rambles a bit. The difference is that everything James Randi has to say, rambling or not, is fascinating. He talked about his travels around the world, about his life and his childhood, about his work as a debunker... it was fascinating. And he's so personable. From the moment he walked in (my boyfriend kind of accosted him to ask for an autograph, because he had to leave early), he was laughing quietly and joking about things. When his microphone batteries died, he handled it beautifully. When my friend couldn't figure out my phone's camera, he was perfectly patient waiting to get a picture taken with me. It still came out blurry, but I don't really care. I got to meet James Randi.

Probably the best part for me, though, was the fact that at the end of the question and answer session, he came down and did a card trick for us. Before he founded JREF, before the Million Dollar Prize, before he was a great debunker of psychics and pseudoscience, he was a magician. Or rather, a conjurer-- he made that distinction at the beginning of a talk. A magician can actually warp the laws of reality, a conjurer merely tricks people into thinking he does so. So James Randi did some conjuring for us. I was quite proud of myself: I caught him at it. I saw what he did, when he did it. My boyfriend's tutelage is helping, apparently.

Finally, he tells a story, at least part of which I feel I must repeat here. He arranged to do the first card trick ever done in space, where an astronaut blindly picked a card and he managed to match it. And when he asked the astronaut-- a highly educated man-- what the odds of that were, the guy gave the correct answer: it was one-hundred percent certain they would have the same card, because it was a trick. Randi called this the correct answer, but said that highly educated people rarely get it.

I've never met someone I admired so much, before. I thought I would be a bit more starstruck... but James Randi, it turns out, is just too friendly, too approachable, to be nervous about. Got his signature, and though it is blurry, I'm still pleased by this:

Tesla coils and a (small) herd of cats

Every spring the Colorado School of Mines takes a weekend to do nerdy things in celebration of E-Days, which is of course short for "Engineering Days." They have a mining competition, pull and ore cart down main street to downtown Golden, build cardboard boats and soapbox cars and trebuchets, and cancel classes for a day and a half to do it. Most of the really neat stuff-- in fact, all of the things I just mentioned-- are tomorrow, but today they had a tesla coil demonstration, and it was awesome.
Tesla coils, for those who do not know, are entirely useless but very cool things which create electrical arcs through the air. That's it. You turn it on and there's lightning arcing up into the air. Or, if there are two of them, across the gap. Useless but very cool. Well, not entirely useless-- some people have managed to turn them into musical instruments, which is awesome. Go to youtube and look up Arc Attack, you'll see what I mean. Anyway, this guy brings in one he built at home, and tells us about Nikola Tesla (look HIM up on "Badass of the Week" for an entertaining read) between turning the thing on and showing us neat stuff it can do-- like putting a little spindle on top with a wire balanced on it, and having the heat from the electricity now arcing off the ends of the wire cause it to spin. Then he let us come up and see the guts and ask questions, and that was awesome, too. Tesla coils are neat, and I want to build one.
Following that I managed to meet up with several of the people I am hoping to organize the SSA group with. The saga continues: we heard from the elusive Matt again, and this time we have a LOCATION for the Tuesday meeting! Hopefully I will yet manage to collapse the wave-function that is Matt, and find out whether we can get all our cats to herd together in a single group. Even so, I met with Nate, one of the people I found while fishing with my button, and two others that are not students but are still quite interested and helpful. We decided that we would like to be sure we are all on the same page before Tuesday, so it's more like two herds of cats coming together, rather than each cat having its own ideas. (At some point I will get tired of calling them cats. That has not yet happened, obviously. I do not anticipate it being soon.) The good news is: the people I met with today are very much on the same page as me, and are people I know I can work with. I hope my observation of the elusive Matt collapses him into a favorable quantum state as well.
We talked about a lot of things-- speakers we would like to get, and a few we might be able to afford sometime soon, ideas for service projects, what our group's official structure should be, good things to include in a mission statement, fun events we could plan on campus, and more. Here is our proposed mission statement at the moment:
"The Secular Student Alliance at the Colorado School of Mines strives to create an welcoming environment for students who embrace a non-religious or skeptical worldview. Our group works to utilize debates, discussion, speaking events, service projects, and cooperation with faith groups on campus to generate a dialogue about supernatural claims, science, ethics, skepticism, and reason."
Hopefully, when we arrive on Tuesday, this will all gel with what Matt and his herd have been thinking, and we can get things moving forward.

Fishing for Cats

The past two days I've worn my new SSA button on campus, hoping that people will recognize it and talk to me about it. The good news is that it has worked: I have had two people ask me about it, and we exchanged contact information and it looks like I'll have more than enough student signatures. This is what I have come to think of as fishing: wearing, doing, or saying something that will elicit a response from the kind of people I want to talk to.

For example, fishing for friends might involve wearing a nerdy t-shirt. Only nerdy people will get it, and by wearing it, I am signalling to them that I am also a nerdy person. They can therefore smile at or comment on my shirt, signalling to me that they got it and are nerdy. In this fashion I can find nerdy people with whom I might want to be friends. Other such strategies would involve listening to a certain kind of music, having a book on a table next to me or an image on my desktop that they might comment on. Or, for the more outgoing type, saying strange things loudly and in public, hoping people will comment. A favorite of ours, when there is a group of us, is to have one of us say "All together now," and for all of us to chime in with the word "Lesbian!" ... we haven't made any new friends this way, come to think, but we have gotten a lot of entertaining reactions, so it works out.

Anyway, I've been wearing the button as a sort of fishing. It's not exactly good manners to walk up to random people and ask if they're an atheist, or whatever other label you want to put on it. Hell, it's not even good manners to ask your friends, though I suppose with your close friends you probably already know. This is part of what had me stalling a bit on getting those student signatures-- how do you go about FINDING these people? The only reason I had any idea who to apprach for a faculty adviser is that I knew one of the physics professors had published a few books that were, at the very least, sympathetic.
So I've found two people, and by extension, probably enough charter members. Of course, it can't be that easy: both of these people have told me they had a friend who was "trying" to start an SSA group, and neither of those friends was the elusive Matt who initially ordered a group starting packet from the SSA. I, it seems, am the only one of the now FOUR people "trying to start" such a group that has been in contact with the SSA. Did I say it was like herding cats? And of course I know each of these four people will have a different vision of what this group ought to be, so I am hoping that the people I am bringing on board will, at least, be willing to be flexible, if not simply accept my leadership because I'm the one actually DOING something.

I'll be meeting again with Nate, the SSA board member, on friday, and I've invited the two I've found to join us. It is my hope that if we are meeting together from the beginning, there will be fewer clashes over differing visions down the road.

Herding Cats

Today, I'm wearing a button with the logo of the Secular Student Alliance. This makes me a little nervous, for a couple of reasons. One, I'm not the most naturally social person, and I am wearing this button in the hopes that people will ask me about it and I can tell them about the group I am trying to start. I am a little afraid that it will have the effect I want, and also a little afraid that it will not, and then I'll have to find a better way. Two, I'm not certain what I will tell people if they do ask me about it; there's been some difficulty with communication, which I will talk more about it a bit. And three, of course, I wonder if it will change people's perception of me in a negative fashion. It is not so obvious as the sticker I'd put on my tablet if I were sure it would stick-- that one says "I'm an atheist! Ask away!" or something of the sort, because the SSA likes to host "Ask an atheist" events. In fact it's probably too subtle for anyone who didn't know what to look for to recognize, which means most of the people who would know what it meant would be friendly, but...

Story time. I've been an atheist for much longer than I have known I was. Once I realized I was an atheist, I didn't have a big coming out or anything. Nor did I feel I was hiding-- my closest friends knew how I felt, why should I tell everyone? Then one night, after a few drinks, I had someone ask me straight up if I was an atheist, and I told him yes, I was... and he stopped talking to me. He avoided me for weeks. And then when he did start talking to me again, it was weird and awkward, like he didn't know how he was supposed to treat me. That is far less severe than I know others have faced. Public perception of atheists is extremely bad-- a recent survey said people trust us about as much as they trust rapists. Things are improving-- where we used to be the most hated group in America, we've now been displaced by the Tea Party. Of course, that could just be because they're louder and more obnoxious. There are a lot of people who are afraid to let the world know that they don't believe in god.

In part, I am afraid of how people will react, too... but in part, I am simply unsure if I want to take this on. It seems a bit like tilting at windmills, trying to alter public perception of such a group of people. I will take it on, though. I made that decision before I set the wheels in motion to start this group. Speaking of which...
Organizing atheists, it has been said, is a little like herding cats. We all very much value our own thoughts and reason, and therefore getting us to follow anyone else is a bit difficult. At least, that's my theory on why we're so difficult to organize. Anyway. When I arrived at Mines and found that there wasn't an atheist/secular/nontheist/skeptics/ANYTHING group, I was a bit miffed. Surely, at a school where everyone is studying science in one way or another, there would be more of us? But no. There are eleven Christian groups, one Muslim group, and nothing for the rest of us. So, when I was getting things in order this semester, I thought I would see about finding others here, maybe starting a group. That set things in motion-- a board member from the SSA contacted me, I met with him as soon as spring break was over, and things are going well. Mostly.

Another person on campus, it turns out, requested a group starting packet back in January. Nate promptly emailed him about meeting and talking about things. And then heard nothing, until last week. Matt (this other student) says that he's gotten a lot of the legwork done, he's found other interested students, and he apologizes for not replying and invites Nate to a meeting on Tuesday... but does not say where this meeting is. Now, I would be happy to collaborate with other students, especially if they've done the part that I find hardest already. But if he vanishes for two months and then doesn't even give us a location... well, the kindest thing I can think of is that he's a space cadet, who forgets things when he's busy. Which makes me wonder how suitable he would be for running a group of this kind. Nate, it seems, is as wary as I am. If we cannot reach Matt to find this meeting tomorrow, how long should we give it before we give up on him and I just do it myself? I don't know.

I would rather avoid this drama. There's bound to be drama enough once the group gets going (it's inevitable, really), I'd rather not have any before we even get off the ground. *sigh*