[Hac-announce] SCORE ANOTHER ONE FOR ATHEISTS, an interview with the president of the Secular Student Alliance (among others)

[Thomas Platt]

Greetings fellow humanists!

Vlad Chituc, the president of the Secular Student Alliance at Yale is  
profiled in an article and video in the Sunday, Nov. 14.  He was  
selected as representative of one of the three social trends which  
were covered.  You can see the video and the article at
http://tinyurl.com/34jaz7g  The written portion is below:


PEEL BACK THE NUMBER TO SEE THE FACES OF THREE SOCIAL TRENDS
Published: Sunday, November 14, 2010 in The New Haven Register

Vlad Chituc is president of the Secular Student Alliance at Yale. A  
recent Pew Research Study found that atheists and agnostics scored  
higher on a test of basic religious knowledge than people who  
identified themselves with a specific religion. (VM Williams/Register)

Until recently, Vlad Chituc, a Yale University junior, had no idea he  
was a trendsetter.

He’s not a slave to high fashion, after all. He’s also not one for  
techno jargon, and he doesn’t race home at lunch to whip up  
pomegranate smoothies.


Yet Chituc happens to personify a social trend that’s bubbling  
beneath the surface of American life. So do a number of local folks.  
Either at work, at home or in their personal beliefs, they’re pushing  
some sort of social envelope.

Of course, trends usually don’t come with names and faces. Instead,  
we see numbers in a study that’s been released, or percentages from  
the latest survey.


For example, one recent survey indicates that more than one-third of  
Americans say it’s OK to walk away from a home mortgage under certain  
circumstances. Another survey finds that more than half of re- 
employed workers say they’re overqualified for their current job.

But those are just numbers.

Here are a few faces to put with the data from a trio of trends.

IN DREAMS

Theresa Balzano of Madison, for instance, says she’s been contacted  
by spirits.



She’s part of the one-third of Americans, according to an Associated  
Press-Ipsos poll, who believe in the spirit world or ghosts.


“I definitely know there’s something out there,” Balzano, 40,  
explains. “I just think there are some people who are more sensitive  
to it than others.”

A deeply religious person who prays regularly, Balzano is quick to  
point out that she’s never seen an apparition in her waking moments.  
Rather, she’s seen the spirits of deceased people in her dreams.

“In one instance, I saw my girlfriend’s father,” she says. “I had  
this feeling that, after he passed, he was coming into my dream  
telling me that he was OK. That his family didn’t have to worry about  
him.”

Balzano insists it wasn’t simply a random dream. She recalls seeing  
the man with a distinctive eyeglass case that had homemade stitching.  
When she described the eyeglass case to her friend, Balzano learned  
that the man was buried with just such an item.

She’s received messages from other spirits in dreams, as well, she  
says. The experience is often comforting.

“It’s not something that happens all the time,” she notes. “It’s only  
when I allow my mind to be open.”

SCORE ONE FOR ATHEISTS

Belief of another sort is at the heart of Chituc’s social trend.

Chituc, 20, is an atheist and president of the Secular Student  
Alliance at Yale. A recent Pew Research Study found that atheists and  
agnostics scored higher on a test of basic religious knowledge than  
people who identified themselves with a specific religion.



For example, the study said atheists and agnostics were more likely  
to know that the “Golden Rule” is not one of the Ten Commandments.


Chituc says he heard about the study soon after it was released.

“It made its way around a lot of blogs online,” he notes. “I thought  
it was a delightful thing to read, but I think it’s ironic, more than  
anything else.”

That’s because ANOTHER study had come out reporting that religious  
people are generally happier than nonbelievers.

“Surveys like this are tricky,” Chituc says. “There’s always a  
tendency to make causal relationships out of these things. A few  
people are interpreting this last one to mean that atheists became  
atheists because they’ve studied religion and rejected it.”

That might be the case for some people, he says, but it doesn’t  
necessarily work as a blanket statement. What’s more, Chituc says he  
knows plenty of religious people who are well-educated and informed  
regarding world religions.

His own experience with religion began in his upstate New York  
hometown, where he grew up in an Eastern Orthodox Christian family.  
He lived far from the nearest Eastern Orthodox church, and Chituc  
says he read the Bible on his own at age 12. “I got the same feeling  
out of it that I got when I read Greek mythology,” he says.

He later flirted with theism — the notion that there is a higher  
power, even if it doesn’t fit into any organized religion — before  
embracing atheism in high school.

Ultimately, Chituc sees religious surveys and polls as tools for  
discussion, rather than weapons in a debate.

“In general, demographic information is important to know. How far  
you take it is where you get into trouble,” he says.



I DO, I DO, BY DEGREE


Ashley Carelock’s trend is entirely about demographics.

She’s 28, college educated and married — a combination that puts her  
right in the middle of a historic social shift. For the first time in  
generations, college-educated people are more likely to be married by  
age 30 than people without a college degree, according to the Pew  
Research Center.

The analysis of Census data showed that in 2008, 62 percent of  
college-educated 30-year-olds were married, compared with 60 percent  
of 30-year-olds without a degree. It’s the reversal of a trend that  
goes back at least 60 years.

“A LOT of our college friends are now married. The ones who aren’t  
are in serious relationships. And everyone has stayed married,” says  
Carelock, who lives in New Haven with her podiatrist husband, Ben.  
Carelock earned a degree in horticulture and entomology at Texas A&M.

She married at age 22, over a spring break. The pastor was a friend  
of hers, and the couple worked both of their fields of study into the  
event: butterflies were released during the service, and they had a  
cake shaped like a foot.

Carelock says she’s not surprised by the Pew Research findings.

“When you’re in college, you’re surrounded by peers,” she says. “I  
was able to find someone as quirky as me, someone who fits me, with  
the same goals in life. When you’re just out in the world working,  
you’re around this small group of people. You really have to put  
yourself out there to meet other people.”