Here's a quick example of a monad. It's something that wraps a value where the value can be freely generic while the rest of the type is not.
So let's use the Option monad in scala. It has two important functions called map and flatMap (map and bind in Haskell). All monads have these properties.
If I have val a0 = Some(25); val a1 = None;
map has a type signature of def map[Q, B](f: A => B): Option[B]
flatMap has a type signature of def flatMap[Q, B](f: A => Option[B]): Option[B]
a0.map((b: Int) => b + 5) would become Some(30)
a0.map((b: Int) => b + 5).map((c: Int) => c - 10) would become Some(20)
a1.map((b: Int) => b + 5) would become None
a1.map((b: Int) => b + 5).map((c: Int) => c - 10) would become None
a0.flatMap((b: Int) => Some(b + 5)) would become Some(25)
a0.flatMap((b: Int) => Some(b + 5)).flatMap((c: Int) => Some(c - 10)) would become Some(20)
a0.flatMap((b: Int) => None) would become None
a0.flatMap((b: Int) => None).flatMap((c: Int) => Some(c - 10)) would become None
a1.flatMap is always None
There's other monads that also wrap a value. The Promise monad wraps the result of an asynchronous computation so that the maps and flatMaps are chained asynchronously. The Error monad is the useful monad. Instead of having a Java function return a value through the return type or an exception through the throws clause, both return and exception values could be returned through the return type. The error monad is most similar to the option monad, which is called the anonymous exception sometimes. But the error monad doesn't have a zero so it's not quite the same as the option monad with zero of None, or the List monad with the zero of empty list.
Every List is a monad as it's a structure that wraps a generic value. The value just happens to be indeterminate.
Monads are just a way to chain events sequentially without having to deal with the background implementations of the structure we're dealing with.

The problem of evil and the problem of free will are actually fairly good disproofs of the existence of God. There's no existing proof for the existence of God that causes my atheism to be a problem.

There's some areas where the government is simply more efficient because the data shows that the government is more efficient. Health care and fire fighting services are two areas where the public sectors is more efficient than the private sector.

I'd like specifics. Which department should handle a compiler? Compilers bring in regular expressions for the syntax, create a parse tree for the semantics, and transform that parse tree into an intermediate pseudo assembly translation and then into the native machine code. I wouldn't trust mathematicians to understand the coding work, I wouldn't trust engineers with the coding work either. Which department should handle database courses? Entity relations, foreign key maps, many-to-many relationship tables, object relational mappers, triggers, and authorization schemas are something that most business departments don't have the technical ability to deal with. A business major acquaintance struggled to understand primary keys using MS Access. How do you plan on the business department to teach PostgreSQL, MySql when most of their students don't have the capacity to learn these DBs and aren't their for their primary purpose to learn new DBs. Which department should teach version control systems? Engineering is mostly pen and paper, mathematics is mostly pen and paper. It's only computer science where application code is built and has the foresight to provide students with version control tools so that the student can understand. Web frameworks and web languages....Once again, business departments don't have the capacity to understand the difference between a POST request and a GET request.

Compile time type checking helps with large applications to reduce the amount of errors. Javascript is an interpreted language with dynamic types and it takes more work to write the application libraries as the application grows. It's not really insane to use a compiler to write javascript if it helps in error reduction.

We have evidence of evolution and we have evidence that that mixing molecules together can create organic molecules. It wasn't long ago that chemists thought that organic molecules were somehow special and too complex to create by man. That theory turned out to be false. The evidence we have for evolution is in the fossil record. Fossils aren't continuous data collections, but snapshots left in time. Many fossils get destroyed before they get preserved. But evolution is a framework that explains common features between us and other primates, between us and cats, between cats and lions. Creationism does not explain why us and other primates look similar other than possible that God lacks an imagination. Young earth creationists also can get challenged by astrophysics and geology as there's evidence of an older planet, star, and universe than what creationists as the age of our planet.

Why should scientists be impressed by someone that can cite Aquinas? Are scientists supposed to care what St. Thomas Aquinas thought when discussing evolution?

Degrees are an arbitrary unit to divide a circle. It has nothing to do with PI. Units of degrees break when doing calculus because the unit isn't a natural unit to put into cosines and sines. Sines and cosines (and e^ix) take as arguments units of numbers. I still don't get what you mean by making PI solvable. There's nothing to solve about PI. It just happens to be the number that relates Diameter and circumference of a circle.

You can use the Maybe monad to terminate things. case Some(x) => x case None => doNothing() The Maybe monad is type safe and forces the developer to handle nonstandard expectations. When used as a return value, it also specifies that the developer should handle when the function didn't break.

The Play Scala framework provides a better web framework. It's more natural to understand. I do agree that Lift wasn't intuitive (although I may go back to it at a later point in time). I disagree with the linguistic complexity. A lot of Scala borrows from FP paradigms and FP attempts to reify programming patterns that are experienced throughout a programmer's life. I don't understand what your criticisms towards Scala are considering Scala is more than just Lift.

This is wrong. A research article just came up on Metafilter. Apparently, in a double blind experiment where both the musicians and the listeners are listening to pieces, the newer instruments sound better. The Stradivarius sound seems to be a human perception similar to wine tasting myths. http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/01/02/144482863/double-blind-violin-test-can-you-pick-the-strad?sc=fb&cc=fp

You know it was used as a last resort to prevent union strikers from going to jail merely for being union strikers. During the 1930s, police would harass and beat socialist protesters for expressing the view that the government needs to intervene in the economy. It's not justice to have the government arrest you for expressing a dissenting opinion and jury nullification was used as a form of judicial protest against overbearing states.

That's only if you're an Ork in the WH40K universe.

How is a multiverse intuitive over probability densities? Not every event is equally likely. If there's an eighty percent chance for an electron to tunnel through a barrier, it's not very intuitive to state that there were eight universes created where the electron tunneled over the two universes where the electron did not tunnel. Some quantum mechanical probabilities involve square roots so even fractions are tossed out the window when trying to describe quantum mechanics in a multiverse model. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but a multiverse explanation of quantum mechanics seems to take away from a full understanding of quantum mechanics.

Bear in mind that the situation is bad for only the bad programmers. When I did computer science, there were people in computer science that could not write code and had no passion for the subject. My co-intern was terminated after three months because she couldn't install an OS from disk and the only language that she had worked with previously with Visual Basic. One of my friends was my group project partner and I cringed when I saw him write for loop increment counters as class member variables. These are the people I'm competing against and I feel somewhat safe knowing that the universities are producing CS holders that are garbage in the workplace.