Got God?
For a group of KU students, God's not dead. He just doesn't exist
By Erik Johnson, Jayplay writer
It's Sunday morning and hundreds of millions of people young and old are waking up and wiping the night's sleep from their eyes. Some don their finest clothes and travel to churches, temples, synagogues and other places of worship to listen to holy men and women preach the good word. Men and women sway in unison, singing powerful gospel choruses while children fidget restgospel churches when lessly in their seats. Others lay thin mats directed toward a holy site, kneel and pray in silence. Sins and other immoral deeds are confessed, sacrifices are made, communions are taken and donations given. But Andrew Stangl is asleep. And he doesn't want to be bothered.
Stangl, Wichita sophomore, is the president of the University of Kansas Society of Open Minded Atheists and Agnostics, a student group that, according to its Website www.ku.edu/~soma, "is devoted to advancing a nonreligious worldview and to challenging religious dogma and the groups that advocate it." The 20 to 30 SOMA members hold weekly meetings discussing various topics and issues, participate in social gatherings and sponsor events to inform students and the general public about secular thought.
dant to evolutionist Charles Darwin and real pain in the
about secular thought.
Students enter college with varying religious attitudes.
The time spent away from the watchful eyes of Mom or Dad is often used for strong reflection of personal beliefs — beliefs that can change dramatically in a short time.
Stangl faded away from the "church scene" earlier in life.
"After I was six my parents stopped taking us to church because they were having problems of their own with the church's teachings," he says. It was years later that Stangl thought a god or other supreme being might not exist at all.
"I wasn't familiar with the terms until someone told me about atheism or agnosticism, and I thought ok, I guess I'm atheist." Stangl says now he considers himself and agnostic-atheist, two often-skewed terms.
and agnostic-atheist, two others show. Atheism is defined as the absence of belief in the existence of a god or gods, generally through deliberate choice or from some natural inability to believe in mounds of religious teachings, which seem to lack credit. In the simplest terms: god does not exist. Agnosticism, on the other hand, doesn't say that god does not exist but rather that it is impossible to know whether god exists. The term 'agnosticism' was coined by T.H. Huxley, confito follow it and always end up falling.
The question of god's existence or nonexistence has no definitive answer on this planet. But according to www.adherents.com, a collection of worldwide spiritual
Church's ass, in 1876. Huxley defined an agnostic as someone who renounced both atheism and theism and who believed the answer to the existence of an all-knowing, all-seeing force was unsolved and simply unsolvable.
Chair of the religious studies department and faculty advisor to SOMA Richard Mirecki says the biggest misconception associated with a nonreligious view of the world is that ethical behavior is directly tied to a religious belief. In a way, he says, religion has hijacked ethics and made it its own. The often inherent belief that if you're not religious you're immoral or amoral, he says, is simply false. "I take the opposite view," Mirecki says. "That the only ethical system that will work is one that comes from humans rather than from the sky where people struggle to follow it and always end up failing."
credence statistics with no religious organization affiliation, members of SOMA are strongly outnumbered in their beliefs. Christianity is the winning religion of sorts, with 33 percent of the world's population following its teachings. Twenty-two percent follow Islamic teachings, and 15 percent adhere to Hinduism. Nonreligious persons, characterized as secular, agnostic, atheist and otherwise nonreligious make up only 14 percent of the world's population, or roughly 200 to 240 million people. The site also indicates the strongest regions for atheistic and agnostic followers are China and Russia, both current or former Communist countries with a strong belief in the separation of religion and state.
But SOMA members don't
want outsiders to immediately associate their group with a political party with a history of fervent radicalism and with a worldwide view as valueless and extreme. "I don't have an active belief in a god, but I'm open minded about it," says Laney Allbritten, Cunningham senior. Allbritten, like many members, considers herself an agnostic-atheist, someone who doesn't believe in traditional gods but also doesn't rule out the possibility that god could exist. "We're not out to take religion away from people," she says. "We're a pretty laid back group willing to talk and listen."
ten."
The four or more years spent in college, Mirecki says, are a time for students to reflect on a lifetime of beliefs, and SOMA is as good a place as any to do that. "This type of organization is great because it's part of the university experience in the sense where a university is a place where the discussion of ideas and beliefs is explored."
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Jayplay 9.30.04