Appearing in Wichita

That's right, I'll be speaking on Rapture Day! What's that, you ask? Here's the official announcement, from the event organizers (the Air Capital Skeptics and the Secular Student Alliance):

Rapture Day is going to be a day of great speakers giving presentations with a focus on religion and how it relates to various doomsday claims. The event will be held at the Wichita State University CAC theater on 21 May 2011. This is the date that Harold Camping, a Christian broadcaster, has claimed will be the day of the Rapture. We are putting this event on for two primary reasons. The first and most important is to have some fun and let other secular thinkers in the area know that they are definitely not alone. The second is to help educate people on the nature and history of these types of claims and help expose how this fatalistic thinking is a danger to our modern society.

Learn all about this event at its official website (RaptureDay.org). It will last all Saturday, 9am to 5pm (see the whole event schedule). The talks all sound like they'll be entertaining. The venue is located at the campus of Wichita State University on Isely Lane (off Perimeter road), near the corner of 17th and Yale (in Wichita, Kansas). I will of course be around and my books will be for sale all day. I'll be happy to sign anything you buy, anytime, as long as you don't interrupt the speakers when approaching me.

Speakers include myself ("You’re all Gonna Die! How the Jews Kept Failing to Predict Doomsday and Caused Christianity Instead"), Blair Scott of American Atheists ("The End Is Near! (Again)"), author and psychologist Darrell Ray ("Exposing the God Virus: Religion as a Mental Infection"), controversial author and activist David Fitzgerald ("The Ten Thousand Christs and the Evaporating Jesus"), the notorious and beloved rabble-rouser J.T. Eberhard ("Dear Christian"), and the always hilarious (but kidding on the square) Brother Sam Singleton ("Patriarchs and Penises").

If you plan to attend, please register so they can be sure to accommodate everyone! And if you want to help out, or even just ensure that more events like this will happen in the region, please donate to their cause. If enough donations come in for events like this, other groups will be encouraged to launch such efforts themselves, and hey, it's just a great way to show your support for organized atheism in the United States, giving it a public profile that shows the people and the politicians that we are not an unmotivated fringe group, but a major demographic that really believes in the cause of reason.