Welcome to the Future
The need for a secular student movement has never been greater. Secular students – no matter if you describe yourselves as atheists, skeptics, freethinkers, agnostics, humanists, or non-theists – wake up each day and face a world heavily influenced by religious fanaticism, ignorance and superstition. Examples are plentiful: - A 2001 Gallup poll indicated that belief in visitations from alien species has increased from 27% to 33% over the last decade of the twentieth century.
- In 2003, U.S. General Boykin spoke to several churches, sometimes in uniform, saying that in the war on terrorism “the enemy is a guy named Satan” and clearly painted the U.S.’s conflicts at the time as Christianity vs. Islam. Boykin’s remarks hit the press in October 2003, when he was in charge of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and held the position of deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence.
- According to a 1999 Gallup poll 47% of Americans believe that human beings were created in their present form within the last ten thousand years.
- A 1997 poll conducted by the National Constitution Center revealed that nearly a quarter of Americans could not name a single civil right guaranteed by the First Amendment.
- In a 2003 Press Conference, President George W. Bush sided with the Religious Right in supporting a ban against same-sex marriage because marriage is a “sacred union between a man and a woman.”
- Gallup regularly polls U.S. voters on how minority status influences voting. In 1999, when asked if they would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist candidate of their party, only 49% said yes. This score is fully ten percentage points lower than the score an otherwise qualified homosexuals received, and even further below the scores women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, Baptists and Mormons received. In fact, no minority scored worse than atheists.
- In December of 2003, Senator Joe Lieberman said that some people “… forget that the constitutional separation of church and state, which I strongly support, promises freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” (our emphasis)
- A 1999 Pew Research Center poll reported that 44% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ would return to earth during their lifetime.
- In March of 2004, President George W. Bush addressed the conference of the 30 million member National Association of Evangelicals. He thanked them on behalf of the country for doing God’s work. On the back of the program for this conference was printed “"What Can 30 Million Evangelicals Do For America? Anything We Want."
We at the Secular Student Alliance would like to see all of this change. The underlying purpose of the Secular Student Alliance is to bring about a society in which the ideals of scientific rationality, secularism, and human based ethics flourish. Whereas many other organizations already exist to spread these values to adult populations, the SSA focuses on fostering these values among high school and college students. The Secular Student Alliance is a national, democratic, membership organization dedicated to promoting freedom through knowledge. Our specific mission is to organize, unite, educate and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific rationality, secularism, and human based ethics. We do this by: - Providing logistical assistance to campus groups.
- Opening lines of communication between student group leaders across the nation through online resources, discussion lists and annual conferences.
- Educating students about the rest of the movement and its foundations in scientific reason and free inquiry.
Student leaders like you founded the SSA in 2000. It is a youthful, independent organization with connections to veterans in the movement, such as the American Humanist Association, Atheist Alliance International, the Institute for Humanist Studies, and many others. In pursuit of our mission, campus groups that affiliate with the SSA are provided a host of benefits that help them kick ass like a ninja in a kindergarten.
When kicking ass, always have the right tools for the job