In one of my recent blog entries, I spoke of the superstition I encountered on the quad at Auburn University.  Not to be outdone, I discovered superstition of an altogether different sort on the quad at the University of Alabama.

Messages like “You don’t need God to be good” and “We believe in good, not God” and “Don’t believe in God?  You’re not alone” were written in chalk all over the quadrangle sidewalks.

There is much I could say about the silly messages (starting with the first, since God is a necessary prerequisite for good), but I was most intrigued by the fact that they felt the need to proselytize.  Why bother?  This is a bizarre feature of the so-called New Atheism.  Annihilating belief in any system of absolutes for moral and ethical behavior, they nonetheless express themselves with the moral outrage of self-righteous, fundamentalist zealots.

I can already hear the many Alabama and Auburn graduates who follow this blog protesting, accusing the other of the more egregious error!  Let me attempt to forestall such sentiments.  Neither offers anything to be proud of.  At the one university we find belief in absurd local folklore; at the other, we find rejection of everything—religion, morality, logic, everything.  Is it any wonder so many students graduate college more confused than when they entered it?  As one academic put it to me, “We get them [i.e., students] as absolutists, and graduate them as relativists!”