I am strongly in favor of placing humanist chaplains throughout our university system. Yea, "chaplain" resonates as a religious word for most of us, but that doesn't mean that religion has sole ownership. Why not claim it as our own? Having been close to many people who where impacted by the VT shootings directly, I believe that not only the availability of a humanist chaplain, but the presence of one mourning along with the rest of the community would have been both comforting and enlightening. By bestowing responsabilities to a leadership class, it does not necessarily mean that we give that class weight over our own reasoning capabilities. A "caste" implies stratification and loss of equality amongst the community, and I don't see that happing with humanist chaplains.

And the final question, the biggie: NO. We CANNOT expect our communities or numbers to grow without offering human services. As far as the "converted" are concerned, we only risk gaining compassion and respect for each other by banding together as communities. As for the rest of the theistic world, we spend far too much energy attempting to dissuade others through reason of something they arrived at by bypassing that very faculty. To grow in numbers significantly, we need to provide an emotional argument as well as a rational one. Instead of trying to convince others that non-belief is the way to go by approaching them much like they would expect an antagonistic bully to, we need to approach them in a more supportive fashion. Offer them opportunities for support, and they will give us a shot! (Humanistic psychology anyone?)

This is an interesting question, though one which I don't feel particularly qualified to answer as my university has no chaplains or professional atheistic leaders. I think professional leadership may very well be a good idea worth spreading, but I do think there are things we need to be careful about. While I do not object to copying whatever good things we may find in religious organizations, I do think it is important that we make an effort to distinguish ourselves from them, that we not simply insert ourselves into their administrative hierarchies. One reason I think this is important is so that people who have rejected religion, "the wounded" as rabbi wine called them, feel comfortable joining our communities. I mean, if there was a humanist chaplain on my campus who's office was in a church and who made no apparent effort to separate himself from religious chaplains, I would probably write such a person off as a religious leader and never involve myself in his activities.

Another concern I would have about humanist chaplains is this: one of the things I have noticed about the christian organizations on my campus, and I'm guessing this is true of christian student organizations generally, is that they all have an old guy who is relatively active in helping organize the group. And sometimes I think they take it too far, to the point where the student leaders feel that they need the approval of the old guy to do anything, rather than the other way around. Student groups are supposed to be run by, well, students. We come to college to learn and experience and develop and try new things and experiment and see where our interests lay and what we are good at, and one of the ways that some of us do that is by becoming involved in the leadership of student organizations. So I would be concerned that professional atheistic leaders might become overly involved in organizing atheist student organizations.