The Secular Student Alliance at North Carolina State University strives to provide a campus community that promotes the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human-based ethics. We envision a future in which nontheistic students are respected voices in public discourse and vital partners in the secular movement's charge against irrationality and dogma.
Dr. Richard Carrier, a world-renowned author and speaker, was featured as a guest speaker of the Secular Student Alliance at NCSU on March 20, 2013 to an audience of over 120 people. As a professional historian, published philosopher, and prominent defender of the American freethought movement, Dr. Carrier has appeared across the country and on national television defending sound historical methods and the ethical worldview of secular naturalism. His books and articles have also received international attention. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in ancient history, specializing in the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, particularly ancient philosophy, religion, and science, with emphasis on the origins of Christianity and the use and progress of science under the Roman empire. He is best known as the author of Sense and Goodness without God, Not the Impossible Faith, and Why I Am Not a Christian. His latest book is Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. He is currently working on his next books, On the Historicity of Jesus Christ, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, and Science Education in the Early Roman Empire.
Watch the event and Dr. Carrier's talk on the TFS event page or on Vimeo.
On 22 Jan. 2013, Katherine Stewart, investigative journalist for publications including Reuters, Religion Dispatches, and The New York Times, spoke to the Secular Student Alliance at North Carolina State University about her work detailed in her recently-published book, “The Good News Club: The Religious Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children”. Ms. Stewart discussed recent trends and deceptive tactics used by the religious right to infiltrate the public education system to target children, especially elementary school students, for religious proselytizing. She detailed specific legislation that has allowed organizations like the Child Evangelism Fellowship to operate religious programs inside of public schools and gave examples of curriculum taught to children by such programs that not only clearly violate the separation of church and state, but teach harmful messages of obedience, sin, shame, and punishment.
Ms. Stewart’s presentation sparked a series of topics which the SSA at NCSU discussed at several successive weekly meetings pertaining to current events surrounding the issue of church/state separation in the sphere of public education, including the ever-shifting public opinion on such issues as well as current legal cases that affect the operations of the religious right in this area. Since these discussions, we have striven to make ourselves more aware of the climate at our own university, where the strong religious vocal majority of the general student body could conceal the university (state) funding of religious activities on campus that could possibly constitute a violation of the separation of church and state.
We are very grateful to the national Secular Student Alliance for providing funding through their Speakers Bureau to help us purchase travel accommodations to bring Ms. Stewart to our campus. We would again like to thank Ms. Stewart for her enlightening and invigorating talk at NCSU.
Excerpts of the talk can be viewed as part of a documentary by filmmaker Scott Burdick covering the Good News Club.
Tonight we started our new postering campaign! Make sure to look for them on your way to class in the morning. Thank you to everyone who came to the meeting and helped put them up! This is a really great step to start increasing our visibility and letting other religiously-unaffiliated students know that they have a community on campus where they can belong.
Everyone is welcome to print the posters and put them up around campus.
Click for the PDFs:
It is more than likely that the posters will receive some amount of backlash - defacement, torn down, etc. If you see this, please take a picture and let us know so that we can document it and put up clean posters (and we can pull them out later for laughs!).
