Non-believers taking college campuses by storm. Uh oh! Fundamentalist Christian heads to explode in 3..2..1

Courtesy of Salon:  

This month at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a select group of students will show their humanitarian spirit by participating in the Bleedin’ Heathens Blood Drive. On February 12, they will eat cake to celebrate Darwin Day, and earlier this year, they performed “de-baptism” ceremonies to celebrate Blasphemy Day, attended a War on Christmas Party, and set up Hug An Atheist and Ask An Atheist booths in the campus quad. 

These activities and more are organized by the Illini Secular Student Alliance (ISSA), one of 394 student groups that are affiliated with the national Secular Student Alliance (SSA). “We brand ourselves as a safe place and community for students who are not religious,” says Derek Miller, a junior at Illini and president of the ISSA. 

Secular groups on college campuses are proliferating. The Ohio-based Secular Student Alliance, which a USA Today writer once called a “Godless Campus Crusade for Christ,” incorporated as a nonprofit in 2001. By 2007, 80 campus groups had affiliated with them, 100 by 2008, 174 by 2009, and today there are 394 SSA student groups on campuses across the country. “We have been seeing rapid growth in the past couple of years, and it shows no sign of slowing down,” says Jesse Galef, communications director at SSA. “It used to be that we would go to campuses and encourage students to pass out flyers. Now, the students are coming to us almost faster than we can keep up with.” 

Damn where were these groups when I was in college?

Once again, of course, I see this as incredibly good news for the future of the country and certainly hope that this indicates that there will soon come a day when as a nation we throw of the shackles of religiosity and start running this nation in a forward thinking, progressive, secular manner.

Hey I guess Rick Santorum was right:

"You know the statistic that at least I was familiar with from a few years ago — I don’t know if it still holds true but I suspect it may even be worse – that 62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it."

Except now it sounds as if many students are actually showing up in college with the idea of searching for information that reinforces their secular points of view and searching for like minded organizations to join. And to my mind discovering knowledge that challenges preconceived notions of the reality that was taught to you as a child is kind of what a higher education is all about.