A student organization that was considered the collective voice for a small but important campus group by its members recently disorganized.
The LSU Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics is now inactive, according to the Center for Student Leadership and Involvement.
Michelle Lowery, the center’s coordinator, said the group gave her no reason for the inactive status.
For an organization to maintain active status, the organization’s leaders must attend orientation. The Center for Student Leadership and Involvement held its orientation sessions last week.
Brad Golson, a mass communication junior and student worker at the Center for Student Leadership, said no one from Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics attended.
The absence of AHA comes as a saddening surpirse for students like Stephanie Schwartzmann, a kineseology senior and former member. She said she found out the club was ending from an e-mail.
In the e-mail, AHA’s president cited lack of participation as the reason for the club’s closing, Schwartzmann said.
“I’m really sad,” Schwartzmann said about the club’s inactive status.
Schwartzmann said the club was a way for people with beliefs that do not coincide with the mainstream – mainly Christianity – to express themselves.
Atheists do not believe in supernatural beings. Humanists place priorities with secular principles rather than spiritual ones, and agnostics believe in a “higher power” but are unsure of its role on Earth.
Schwartzmann said her family was Catholic and she attended a Catholic school. She questioned her religion in high school but not openly.
Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics was a group of people Schwartzmann said she felt comfortable with when expressing ideas many people believe are religiously controversial.
“It was an intelligent forum,” she said.
Discussion topics included evolution, philosophy and whether or not there is an afterlife, Schwartzmann said.
“It was good to have an organization at LSU for people who did not believe [Christianity] or a place to to question their faith,” she said.
Schwartzmann, who calls herself an Agnostic, said she never felt overwhelmed by campus Christians, but she does not understand why Christians often debated their views with hers.
“People would come up and say, ‘We want to save you,’ but we never wanted to convert people to what we believe,” she said. “We never went to the BCM and asked, ‘Why do you believe?'”