Atheists, agnostics, and other questioning minds now have a place for discussion and action in SF State’s newest club, AASK: the Association for the Advancement of Secular Knowledge.

“I really wanted to start an organization where people feel comfortable saying ‘I’m an atheist, secularist or pantheist' and feel legitimate,” stated Karl Kohler, an anthropology major and vice president of AASK, at it’s inaugural meeting this past Wednesday. “You can be anything as long as you ascribe to the fact that we need to have a more secular society.”

Still on fresh legs as SF State’s first-ever secularist club, the meeting was more of an initial dialogue between members to establish the club’s presence and intent, and was “unstructured by design.” Kohler, a self-described “very extreme agnostic,” was inspired to start the club after seeing British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins speak in Berkeley.

“It was not the lecture itself that inspired me to start the club, but the atmosphere surrounding it,” he said.

“Here I was, sitting in an auditorium that easily had a few hundred other people and they all, presumably, shared my philosophical outlook. People from every race, sex, gender, political persuasion, economic and social class all came together under the auspices of seeing someone lecture on a topic that until recently was, if not simply taboo, outright reviled in the public discourse.”

Wednesday’s spirited discussion touched on topics spanning from religious holidays, whether atheism and faith are comp atible, if atheism is anti-God or anti-religion, the beginning of the universe, how atheists deal with the acceptance of death, and personal turning points in members’ path to secularism.

“I would call myself a born-again atheist,” said Ally, a philosophy and psychology major. “I went through a Christian phase in high school, but the more I started to learn about it, the more I started to question it.”

In telling his own story, Kyan, a Chinese major in attendance to simply learn more about secularism, referred to the struggle to reconcile his past exposure to Christianity with his own sexuality.

“I knew early on something was up with my sexuality,” he explained. “I kept thinking it was wrong to come out, and at the beginning of high school, I was a depressed kid. God and Christ are supposed to make everyone happy. If it wasn’t for Christianity, I would’ve been fine.”

Alys Demercurio, a 21-year-old political science major, likes to study religion from a scientific standpoint.

“Most of us support doubt and skepticism,” she said. “People can believe what they want, I just don’t want other peoples’ views affecting my life.”

Michael Sudduth, a professor of philosophy at SF State, said he recognizes that today’s scientifically sophisticated society presents many challenges to the religious world.

“It is often said that one of the challenges theism [belief in God] faces is to keep itself relevant in a world of increasing scientific and technological sophistication,” said Sudduth. “Won't we just eventually outgrow this ‘infantile’ belief in God? Theism seems to be meeting this challenge. Perhaps the question is: how do atheism and agnoticism make themselves relevant in a world in which the vast majority of people continue to believe in the existence of a Supreme being of some sort, despite our scientific and technological advancements? That's a challenge I think, a significant one.”

One of the answers may be the preservation of the separation of church and state, which AASK intends to tackle head-on.

“We believe in a clear separation of chuch and state, and are concerned about legislation motivated by faith-based interests,” said Mann. “This includes the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools, discouraging stem cell research, and eroding reproductve rights.”

The club’s members are rife with ideas for events that include debates on topics such as Creationism versus Evolution, lectures by guest speakers and philosphy professors, and viewing films such as Bill Maher’s "Religulous," "Jesus Camp," "Monty Python’s Life of Brian," and other relevant films.

Concerned with the stigma attached to words like “atheist,” one of the club’s biggest challenges is to erase that discrimination in a university setting and beyond by aiming to be inclusive, not exclusive.

“In parts of America, identifying as an atheist can close a lot of doors,” said Christopher Mann, a physics major and co-founder. “Somewhere along the way it became taboo to run for public office as a secularist. We think that stigma is misguided, and want to improve public debate by demystifying what it means to be a secularist, and to reestablish our right to exist alongside those of faith.”

Members of AASK, who have been tabling on the campus quad Mondays and Wednesdays, say that students have been receptive to their message.

“About 85 percent of them are friendly and interested,” said Demercurio. “We don’t want friction with the public. We’ve taken a pacifist role and if they don’t agree, the group isn’t for them.”

Indeed, secularist clubs at schools are growing in numbers. According to the Secular Student Alliance website, www.secularstudents.org, there are 16 secular student clubs in California alone, including ones at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and California Lutheran University. At SF State alone, there are 12 religious clubs.

Andrew Scott, a computer science major and philosophy buff, thinks such clubs’ most noble role is to get people thinking.

“For some, talking about atheism may be their first introduction to thinking philosophically about the world, which I think is good,” he said. “Many people may be atheists and not even know it.”

Kohler’s ultimate goal for the club remains one of putting secularism and its followers out on the market of ideas.

“Richard Dawkins has pointed out that an approach much like the homosexual ‘out of the closet’ movement, atheists and agnostics need to make themselves visible to their families and friends, and even strangers, in order to demonstrate that we are not simply a few kooks who live outside the mainstream,” he said. “We are a sizeable portion of the population of this country and world from every walk of life, and that we have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

AASK meets every Wednesday in HUM 286 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Any questions can be e-mailed to secular@sfsu.edu.