GeologyJack
New Member
Hello everyone,
I don't post here much unfortunately but I have decided to bring up a little bit of a story from my past and then get a feel for the opinions of the masses.
A bit of a background, I was actively involved in my university, the school which will not be named, was a science and technology school. When I first attended the school back in the fall of '07 I came in with the opinion that I would be joining a community of fellow skeptics; at the very least I expected that the amount of fundamentalist belief at the school would be minimal, if not non-existant. Unfortunately my experience was a twist that not even M. Night Shyamalan could have written on a good day of writing. Within my first month of attendance, I had seen over-religious fundamentalists pick fights with highly experienced geologists over the age of the Earth, I was privy to a heated argument between an ethics professor and a student bickering over if it was ethical for us to allow our world to be polluted since, according to the student, the savior would come in our lifetime and there was no need to divert effort from praising and worshiping to save the environment, and finally, I for the first time witnessed the oppresion of a mysogenistic world view upon people of a traditional muslim background.
Phew, that was a run on sentence if I have ever seen one.
Sure, there was more than a fair share of like-minded skeptics, but the real point of this post concerns an incident I was part of in my second to last year. Campus had a club named the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. They were very active in prosthelytizing the campus, first bringing members by holding events that were billed as being analytical and truthful studies of religious ideologies, then using those events to actively deny any truth outside the Bible. They were a spirited bunch, which was shocking for such a depressing school. Being happy in my non-theism, I never felt any need to bolster my mood through religion, but I watched these students actively push their views on others and it disgusted me. Their leader was a girl who should have worn a gigantic sign around her neck stating "Conflict of Interest," she was the treasurer of the campus's club comittee, she was vice-president of the student body, she was president of the Intervarsity club, and was actively involved with many other campus ministries.
At the time I was serving as the school's paliamentarian, essentialy the rules keeper of the student body. One afternoon near the end of one of our executive meetings, the treasurer decided to bring up the issue of our dwindling budget, it looked as though more clubs would need to start charging dues to cover their expenses. Suddenly, Miss Conflict of Interest started raising a fit, she did not feel it was right for her club to charge money to spread the word of god. This of course sparked my interest as a non-theist, but I was not the first to speak out. Our treasurer, who I had mistakenly assumed to be theistic, spoke out that as an atheist she was uncomfortable that her money was going to support any sort of prosthelytizing on campus. Miss CoI then let it slip that her club had been purchasing Bibles for every new member of the club using school funds. This sparked outrage in both the treasurer and myself.
It was not long before I took my share of action in this. Personally I did not care that they were buying material with their allocated money, I felt their reaction might be the same if I had mentioned that another share of the money was going to support both the astronomy club, my radio show which routinely had skeptical themes, and my regular skeptical column in the newspaper. Of course this is a matter of scale, at most I received several hundred dollars for my work and it was all distinctly labeled as an opinion piece if what I was doing had the potential to hurt feelings. My real issue involved the other groups on campus that were not fundamentalist Christian, there was a Islamic group that relied upon their own funds to purchase Qu'rans, and it was unheard of for the Catholic, Mormon, or Jewish groups to turn to the school to fund their goal of spreading their faith.
For my action I did my best to spread the information around, I mentioned it in a column that was assited by the treasurer, though that column was thrown out in favor of some other event on campus; though the chief of staff and head editor were non-theists, much of the other staff was not. Still, it has been at least two years and the groups continue. I have since graduated but am coming back to school in the fall.
So here is my question, is it right that the group should be using funds collected from all of the students, regardless of their faith, to purchase and distribute religious materials?
I don't post here much unfortunately but I have decided to bring up a little bit of a story from my past and then get a feel for the opinions of the masses.
A bit of a background, I was actively involved in my university, the school which will not be named, was a science and technology school. When I first attended the school back in the fall of '07 I came in with the opinion that I would be joining a community of fellow skeptics; at the very least I expected that the amount of fundamentalist belief at the school would be minimal, if not non-existant. Unfortunately my experience was a twist that not even M. Night Shyamalan could have written on a good day of writing. Within my first month of attendance, I had seen over-religious fundamentalists pick fights with highly experienced geologists over the age of the Earth, I was privy to a heated argument between an ethics professor and a student bickering over if it was ethical for us to allow our world to be polluted since, according to the student, the savior would come in our lifetime and there was no need to divert effort from praising and worshiping to save the environment, and finally, I for the first time witnessed the oppresion of a mysogenistic world view upon people of a traditional muslim background.
Phew, that was a run on sentence if I have ever seen one.
Sure, there was more than a fair share of like-minded skeptics, but the real point of this post concerns an incident I was part of in my second to last year. Campus had a club named the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. They were very active in prosthelytizing the campus, first bringing members by holding events that were billed as being analytical and truthful studies of religious ideologies, then using those events to actively deny any truth outside the Bible. They were a spirited bunch, which was shocking for such a depressing school. Being happy in my non-theism, I never felt any need to bolster my mood through religion, but I watched these students actively push their views on others and it disgusted me. Their leader was a girl who should have worn a gigantic sign around her neck stating "Conflict of Interest," she was the treasurer of the campus's club comittee, she was vice-president of the student body, she was president of the Intervarsity club, and was actively involved with many other campus ministries.
At the time I was serving as the school's paliamentarian, essentialy the rules keeper of the student body. One afternoon near the end of one of our executive meetings, the treasurer decided to bring up the issue of our dwindling budget, it looked as though more clubs would need to start charging dues to cover their expenses. Suddenly, Miss Conflict of Interest started raising a fit, she did not feel it was right for her club to charge money to spread the word of god. This of course sparked my interest as a non-theist, but I was not the first to speak out. Our treasurer, who I had mistakenly assumed to be theistic, spoke out that as an atheist she was uncomfortable that her money was going to support any sort of prosthelytizing on campus. Miss CoI then let it slip that her club had been purchasing Bibles for every new member of the club using school funds. This sparked outrage in both the treasurer and myself.
It was not long before I took my share of action in this. Personally I did not care that they were buying material with their allocated money, I felt their reaction might be the same if I had mentioned that another share of the money was going to support both the astronomy club, my radio show which routinely had skeptical themes, and my regular skeptical column in the newspaper. Of course this is a matter of scale, at most I received several hundred dollars for my work and it was all distinctly labeled as an opinion piece if what I was doing had the potential to hurt feelings. My real issue involved the other groups on campus that were not fundamentalist Christian, there was a Islamic group that relied upon their own funds to purchase Qu'rans, and it was unheard of for the Catholic, Mormon, or Jewish groups to turn to the school to fund their goal of spreading their faith.
For my action I did my best to spread the information around, I mentioned it in a column that was assited by the treasurer, though that column was thrown out in favor of some other event on campus; though the chief of staff and head editor were non-theists, much of the other staff was not. Still, it has been at least two years and the groups continue. I have since graduated but am coming back to school in the fall.
So here is my question, is it right that the group should be using funds collected from all of the students, regardless of their faith, to purchase and distribute religious materials?
