Atheist group denied official club status

It is funny how Notre Dame's philosophy classes fully encourage this type of questioning, but they won't allow a club for people who are convinced by the arguments brought up in the philosophy classes.

Notre Dame will never be a true top tier university if they don't allow their students to meet freely and express themselves.

Yeah, that's the level of intellectual inquiry demanded by an atheist student group that compares its existence to Jewish and Muslim groups on campus.

Mission

The University of Notre Dame is a Catholic academic community of higher learning, animated from its origins by the Congregation of Holy Cross. The University is dedicated to the pursuit and sharing of truth for its own sake. As a Catholic university, one of its distinctive goals is to provide a forum where, through free inquiry and open discussion, the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity.

The intellectual interchange essential to a university requires, and is enriched by, the presence and voices of diverse scholars and students. The Catholic identity of the University depends upon, and is nurtured by, the continuing presence of a predominant number of Catholic intellectuals. This ideal has been consistently maintained by the University leadership throughout its history. What the University asks of all its scholars and students, however, is not a particular creedal affiliation, but a respect for the objectives of Notre Dame and a willingness to enter into the conversation that gives it life and character. Therefore, the University insists upon academic freedom that makes open discussion and inquiry possible.

The University prides itself on being an environment of teaching and learning that fosters the development in its students of those disciplined habits of mind, body, and spirit that characterize educated, skilled, and free human beings. In addition, the University seeks to cultivate in its students not only an appreciation for the great achievements of human beings but also a disciplined sensibility to the poverty, injustice and oppression that burden the lives of so many. The aim is to create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice.

Notre Dame also has a responsibility to advance knowledge in a search for truth through original inquiry and publication. This responsibility engages the faculty and students in all areas of the University, but particularly in graduate and professional education and research. The University is committed to constructive and critical engagement with the whole of human culture.

The University encourages a way of living consonant with a Christian community and manifest in prayer, liturgy and service. Residential life endeavors to develop that sense of community and of responsibility that prepares students for subsequent leadership in building a society that is at once more human and more divine.

Notre Dame's character as a Catholic academic community presupposes that no genuine search for the truth in the human or the cosmic order is alien to the life of faith. The University welcomes all areas of scholarly activity as consonant with its mission, subject to appropriate critical refinement. There is, however, a special obligation and opportunity, specifically as a Catholic university, to pursue the religious dimensions of all human learning. Only thus can Catholic intellectual life in all disciplines be animated and fostered and a proper community of scholarly religious discourse be established.

In all dimensions of the University, Notre Dame pursues its objectives through the formation of an authentic human community graced by the Spirit of Christ.

Look, ND sponsors all kinds of intellectual debate about God and the existence of a deity. It has world class theology and philosophy departments which already sponsor all kinds of debates, lectures, and discussions about this stuff.

This group is bad not because it consists of students who don't believe in a deity. Rather, they're just ignorant. They sound like a bunch of tourists in Mexico asking, "where's all the Mexican food?".

-------------------

This post was literally too stupid to respond to.

When you don't forgive another, you objectify that person, hardening him or her into a particular mold. That is only a portion of that person's being. So long as you hold on to that frozen image of the other person, the two of you will continue to play out the same dynamic. Forgiveness renders the relationship fluid again, allowing you to see other aspects of that person. Then you, too, are freed to exist more fully, not frozen into one posture.
--Thomas Merton
...
Until recently,then, modernity was mistaken in its relation to truth, and thus to God and humankind. But even so modernity has, to its great credit, by grant of Providence, made three great institutional discoveries. Modern thinkers first worked out, as neither the ancients nor the medievals did, the practical principles of the threefold free society: free in its polity, free in its economy, and free in the realm of conscience and inquiry. The great modern achievements in these matters have been supremely practical: how to make free institutions work at least tolerably well, and better in most ways than earlier regimes.

However, despite these happy practical gains, modernity tore down the only philosophical foundation that can sustain the free society. The Age of Enlightenment was supposed to do away with sectarian bickering, but it did not. If you stay within your own school of thought, the foundations of the free society may seem secure. Peek outside, however, and you will hear raucous voices shouting. The Age of Enlightenment has failed to secure an intelligent mode of public moral argument that gets beyond the language of the playpen.
--Michael Novak, No One Sees God

Were mankind's belief in its immortality to be destroyed, not only love but also any living power to continue the life of the world would at once dry up.
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Hope is not the belief that we can change things. Hope is the belief, that what we do matters.
--Vaclav Havel, Nobel Acceptance Speech

Religion therefore is only a particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human heart as hope itself. Only by a kind of aberration of the intellect and with the aid of a sort of moral violence exercised on their own nature do men stray from religious beliefs; an invincible inclination leads them back to them. Disbelief is an accident; faith alone is the permanent state of humanity.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The sense of the world must lie outside the world.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."
--Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (Jefferson Lecture)

What you have as heritage, Take now as task; For thus you will make it your own!
--Goethe, Faust

"Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach skepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law."
--William James, "The Will to Believe"

Until someone does that, I'll believe in Moses, I'll believe in Jesus, I'll believe in everything in between, but I'll believe in them as historical figures no more descended from "God" than Julius Caesar was descended from Venus.

Robert Brian Crim,
Naples, Fl,
geometry@infionline.net