By Amanda K. Metskas

As almost any non-believer can tell you, there is a lot of misunderstanding out there about atheists, agnostics, humanists, and non-religious people of all stripes. Even before we get to the issues on which secular people disagree with religious people, there is a lot of brush clearing that has to be done just to get to the point where each of the groups understands what the other group actually believes and stands for.

Members of Students For Freethought (SFF) at the Ohio State University (www.sffosu.org) took a crack at this problem by hosting a panel called “Ask an Atheist or Agnostic.” One evening in mid-February five members of SFF served as panelists and took questions from an audience of around fifty people about their worldviews and lives. Panelists represented a diversity of viewpoints and religious histories. Don Sutterfield, for example, is a former Christian youth minister who became an atheist as an adult. Jeff Dubin, a social worker in Columbus, was raised as a secular Jew. Most of the audience members were people who did not normally attend SFF meetings, and they asked questions about a number of topics.

SFF President and moderator of the panel, Stuart Wells, introduced the event by saying that the point was not to convert anyone, but rather for us to learn from each other. Many of the audience members had not previously had a chance to ask someone who was openly non-religious about what they believe, and the panel provided answers to questions about where they got their values, how they found meaning in their lives, how they lost their faith, how they felt about death and how they spent their Sunday mornings. Aside from some minor tension surrounding the use of the words “when” vs. “if” in a question about the second coming, the event was very cordial and positive.

A few months later students from the Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics (SOMA) at the University of Kansas (www.ku.edu/~soma/) held an “Ask an Atheist” panel on their campus. The panel included students, faculty members, and community members. Dr. Paul Mireki, the group’s advisor and a professor of religious studies at University of Kansas; Jo Ann Mooney, President of Heartland Humanists a local humanist group near Kansas City; and SOMA members Jim Boyd, Erika Shearer were among the panelists. Stephanie Kirmer, the SOMA webmaster, reported that “the event was attended by approximately 70 people, and they asked mostly well-thought out and respectful questions.” She went on to say that “some of the topics they covered included: ethics, death, the meaning of life, the idea of proofs of god or not, and whether religion is necessary or good for society.”

Contacts forged between SFF and SOMA members through conferences and other SSA-sponsored events helped this idea to travel from one campus to another. Seeing the obvious success and benefit from this event, the SSA plans to send out an activity packet to all of its campus affiliate groups to help them hold similar panels on their campuses in the future.

Bright Beginnings is a bimonthly column reporting on the secular student movement published by the Secular Student Alliance. It is syndicated in more than 20 freethought newsletters. For information on getting Bright Beginnings in your newsletter, contact August E. Brunsman IV at august@secularstudents.org. Bright Beginnings is written by Amanda K. Metskas, a third-year graduate student in Political Science at the Ohio State University. Metskas is a member of Students for Freethought at OSU and the SSA. She can be reached at amanda@secularstudents.org.