Yeah, I was thinking about that, except the meeting is in between the hotel and the train station, so I might as well just take it with me. I'll make it work. For one thing, I have no problem with having lunch at 11:30, and/or sitting in random lobbies to kill time.

Travel~ma, zuisa! Does it make sense to ship stuff?

Sadly, not an Onion article: UNCW prof vows to destroy atheist student groups: "I seek power over the godless heathen dissident"

A Supreme Court decision forced a California state university Christian society to accept gays as members as a condition of receiving support from the school ("Other groups may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks, and women -- or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks, and women. A free society must tolerate such groups. It need not subsidize them, give them its official imprimatur, or grant them equal access to law school facilities.").

This ruling has upset Mike Adams, a prof at UNC Wilmington. He's vowed to disrupt atheist student societies by filling their rosters with Christian evangelical students, "to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God."

As PZ Myers points out, if the situation were reversed, Adams and his fellow travelers would doubtless be even more apoplectic: "I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury."

But Mike Adams isn't looking for debate. As he says, "I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident."

As he says, "I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident."

Godless Heathen Dissidents would be a great name for a band.

Does anyone else hyperventilate? I’ve been on and off doing it for the last week or so and it’s really pissing me off. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid but this is a really long stretch even for me. Any advice? The only thing I can do is try and breathe shallowly to reboot my stupid brain but then I either get distracted and notice I’m yawning to get extra air or just give in and do it anyway. Grrr. And then when I do stop, I notice I’ve stopped and just the thought of the act of hyperventilating is enough to set me off again.

Also, godless heathen dissent is like my number one pasttime.

Is "godless heathen" redundant, or no? I mean, I guess you could be a heathen with different god(s), but if you're godless, aren't you by definition a heathen? Just checking.

I figured out lunch -- an old standby Irish pub, perfectly located. Phew. Now I feel like I should be working, or at least preparing, but don't really have anything to do. Man, this trip is a total boondoggle.

I think there's an actual Heathen movement, and I think it invoves the Norse pantheon. But the original meaning of the word had something to do with people who lived out in the heath, i.e., country people, to whom Rome hadn't conveyed Christanity yet. They had their gods, but the church didn't recognize those gods as real or valid, hence "godless".

I thought pagans were the country rubes who hadn't heard the Word of God yet, and so couldn't be blamed for their sin, and heathens were those barbarians who had heard the Word and rejected it in favor of their own gods.

"Godless heathen" is self-contradictory, no? A heathen believes in many gods. Godless is atheist.

If I were a student at that school, I would quit. Loudly.

I had no idea! Huh.

I thought pagans were the country rubes who hadn't heard the Word of God yet, and so couldn't be blamed for their sin, and heathens were those barbarians who had heard the Word and rejected it in favor of their own gods.

Etymologically, they both pretty much translate into "ignorant hick." Pagus = heath = rural countryside.

[eta: Either way "godless" is redundant, because even if the pagan/heathens did have their own gods, they weren't real gods and therefore didn't count.]