To subscribe to our blog posts, make sure to check out the new website Applied Sentience!

On Applied Sentience you will continue to receive posts on Humanist issues by Rutgers students, alumni, professors and other contributors.

Hope you enjoy!  And make sure to let us know what you think about the new website in the comments below!

The idea of the Board is, first, to simply provide a degree of awareness among Rutgers students of like-minded professors.  Part of the mission of the Chaplaincy is to provide a sense of community on the Rutgers campus.  And part of community requires being acquainted with who the other members of that community are!  Second, Board members will be encouraged to have informal dinners with students, that the Chaplaincy will help arrange, and to submit pieces to the Rutgers Humanist blog Applied Sentience.

Our first three members are all professors in the Psychology Department: Professors Gary Brill, Julien Musolino, and Daniel Ogilvie. To see their biographies and some of their current research, TED talks and interviews check out the link!

Though this is a good start, keep checking the page.  We’ll be approaching many more professors over the summer and coming term!

Have any ideas or recommendations?? Make sure to put them in the comments below?

Rutgers Against Hunger (RAH) and a new student group committed to working with RAH – studentorganizedrah@gmail.com (SO-RAH). need help with upcoming events (you can wear your group’s t-shirts):

1. SO-RAH Hunger Games (4/11), providing food for young students WHO CAME FROM FOSTER CARE SYSTEM.
2. ***Volunteers at Community Food Bank of NJ (4/13, 11:30am-1:30pm) – 10 SLOTS AVAILABLE! , Transportation to Hillside provided from campus
3. NJ PIRG Hunger and Homelessness campaign. Collect food from households in New Brunswick and spread the word about hunger issues

Volunteers at Elijah’s Kitchen, New Bruns. (4/13) – NO MORE SLOTS AVAILABLE; next openings in June and after.

CONTACT RutgersHumanist [@] gmail.com for information.

~Barry Klassel

Want to make a difference in the world?

Foundation Beyond Belief is a non-profit devoted to “encouraging and demonstrating Humanist generosity and compassion.”  FBB does this by focusing on fundraising and sponsoring charities working in the areas of Education, Poverty and Health, Human Rights and the Natural World.

They also engage in inter-religious cooperation through their Challenge the Gap program that works with charities based in other worldviews.

From May 1 to August 31, 2013 Summer Interns will work online at home in the areas of:

• Assisting the Foundation with membership development
• Researching and selecting featured charities
• Donor management
• Outreach, communications (including blog and social media)
• Program design
• And creative organizational development

Click here to learn more about their Summer Interns Program.

We have lots of exciting plans.  But what does this all mean for you?

Well Humanist Issues will be continuing to send out updates to our subscribers list.  However, we will be reserving this page for news and updates about the Humanist Chaplaincy at Rutgers as well as its events at Rutgers University.

We will be discontinuing the blog portion of Humanist Issues.  Instead we hope you subscribe and continue reading our affiliated blog Applied Sentience!  At AppSent the format will be significantly different.  Specifically, one of the main aims is to nurture more involvement from Faculty and Alumni.

Also, of worthy note, Applied Sentience is currently looking for Staff Writers to regularly contribute pieces to the blog.  We already have a few writers signed up, so make sure to apply soon!  We’re looking for qualified writers, both current undergraduates and graduate students as well as Rutgers alumni.

You can check out the AppSent website for more details.  And make sure to also check us out on Facebook!

Stay tuned for more updates!!

Instead we are announcing Applied Sentience, a new independent blog!

Plans for a new website and social media are already in the works.  We’re also looking for staff writers from Rutgers undergraduate, graduates and alumni.

In the coming weeks we’ll make sure to keep you up to date about the transition!

The Chaplancy’s blog Humanist Issues is planning some BIG CHANGES.  We’re hoping to develop more and better content, reach more readers and attract more involvement from Rutgers students and alum.

To help with this expansion, I would like to introduce and welcome Raj Gopal, the blog’s new Co-Editor in Chief!

Raj is a Rutgers Philosophy major who graduated in 2011. He currently also works as staff writer at Quiet Lunch Magazine and is a writer for Dispatches from the Armchair.

In the coming months, Raj will be helping lead the way in expanding readership, editing articles, developing social media, bringing in fresh ideas, and providing an outlet for Rutgers students and alum to discuss and get their ideas out!

It’s almost midnight.  Two friends in their twenties walk down the beach toward the water.  Behind them, the lights of the city glow in the distance.

Earlier in the day the two attended the funeral of a third friend.  His family seemed devastated, but one by one various speakers did their best to talk about the life of the deceased and his last days in pain as they tried to deal with the difficulty of accepting his death.

The two friends sit silently on the sand.  Before them, the waves surge and retreat. The dark sky above is pin-pointed with a million stars.

One of the friends is deeply religious.  The funeral had raised some nagging doubts, exposed some fault lines in his faith.  How could someone die so young, a couple of weeks before he was to be married?  It was not to be understood.  But there must be some reason and only…

————-

This post as been republished on Applied Sentience.  To continue reading please follow the link.

Very sorry for any inconvenience!

Two Weddings

The message on our placard was straightforward: “It’s Not Complicated: I Want to Marry the Man I Love. Case Closed.” My husband and I carried that sign for many years in the New York Gay Pride Parades—long before we had legal married status.

A few months after our 30^th living-together anniversary, we were finally married in California in 2008. A few weeks later, voters passed the mean-spirited Proposition 8, which halted marriage equality in that state. A court subsequently ruled that the 18,000 same-sex marriages that had been performed were not nullified by the vote. We breathed an enormous sigh of relief. It had been a wonderful wedding on a riverboat in the Sacramento River, with our daughter Deb Sweeney co-officiating, and our granddaughter Cathleen as flower girl.

In 2011, after marriage equality became law in New York, we got married here too—as it happened, exactly three years to the day after the Sacramento ceremony. Our lawyer suggested that it would be a good idea to have legal status in our home state, and—believe it or not— Governor Cuomo himself told my husband that we should get the knot tied here too: at a serendipitous meeting at a movie premier, shortly after the new law was passed, David (yes, my husband is also David) thanked the governor for his vigorous leadership on the issue. He told Cuomo that we’d been married three years previously in California. The governor said, “Do it again here!”

Who Would Have Thought?

So, we had two weddings, and these two events serve to illustrate how attitudes have shifted. When we held the two wedding parties in 2008 and 2011, many relatives showed up to help us celebrate—even those whom we knew to be conservative Republicans. Over the years, our status as a couple had become obvious to our families. No: we were not just good friends. We were proud of the photos of us carrying the placard, and in 1999 we were featured (along with thirteen other couples) in a book entitled, When Love Lasts Forever: Male Couples Celebrate Commitment. In 2008 the wedding banquet was held at our favorite restaurant that was owned by a devout Catholic family. When I asked the owner, “You don’t mind having a gay wedding here?” she said to me, “My parents taught us not to look down on anyone” –a lesson lost, obviously, on the Catholic hierarchy.

In 2012 the president who had endorsed marriage equality and ended Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell was re-elected—and on that election night voters in four states approved marriage equality. Previously we had always lost at the ballot box.

The trend in public opinion is clear, and in 2013 the Supreme Court may (or may not) give our cause a major boost. But surely 25 or 50 years from now marriage equality will be considered part of the fabric of a just and fair society committed to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens.

Will Atheists Be Welcome Out of the Closet Too?

Even when I was a teenager in rural Indiana in the 1950s I knew I was gay, and I would eventually come to terms with that. It took another 20 years for the religious indoctrination I’d been brought up with to wear off, and I was openly atheist as well. Not surprisingly, those conservative Republicans who showed up for the wedding are far less forgiving about that.

But, in general, has there been a parallel softening of attitudes toward atheists?

Polling evidence indicates that the number of non-believers has been increasing, and we may be under-represented in the polls because many folks are afraid to admit that they’re atheists. I suspect that belief has been eroding as a consequence of the flood of atheist writings in the last decade—with several books on the best seller lists. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens come to mind, of course, but there are hundreds of other authors who have taken deadly aim at Christianity especially.

And they’re all on YouTube. There has never been such easy access to the atheist message. When the gay rights movement was finding its full voice, one critic lamented that it was impossible to get “the love that dare not speak its name” to shut up. And the very vocal atheist movement is here to stay as well. The full frontal assault on religion now resonates with many people.

But will the church folks—the preachers, ordinary believers and theologians—be willing to bury the hatchet with atheists? Will acceptance of atheism follow the same trajectory as the acceptance of gay people? I suspect that the struggle will be much more protracted.

Wanting to Get to Heaven   

And here’s why: is it really a big deal for straight people to say, “Well, why not let gay people get married”? The sky has not fallen in the states that allow it. I suspect that opinion on this has shifted because straight folks can sense the violation of fair play—and they know that their own marriages are not in jeopardy. They now count enough gay people among their friends to know that the lurid lies told about us are rubbish. All of the dire warnings about gay people now seem pretty silly.

But atheists are another matter. Atheism does seem to represent a palpable threat.

People want a friendly Cosmos, the kindly ‘man upstairs,’ and—above all else—the formula for escaping death. When you mess with the myths to which people cling for dear life, then it’s personal. They don’t want to hear our carefully reasoned arguments against the gods and their hope for heaven. There was once intense white-knuckle rage when people saw a black man dating a white woman; that’s pretty much a thing of the past. And the sight of two men kissing rates a ho-hum these days; ten years ago network TV didn’t dare show such a thing. But there is still a high quotient of white- knuckle rage when people hear the atheist message. Being told that your religion is false is a sharp stick in the eye. They don’t want that message to have equal time.

Honest Thinking Is Better Than Wishful Thinking

David Madison is an ex-clergy writer living in New York. He maintains a Facebook page as a platform for his writing projects relating to the Bible and theology.