At Southern Methodist University, religious students are presented with many options for worship and community gathering. In the ‘Student Organizations’ section of SMU’s website, 13 chartered religious organizations can be found.

SMU, however, currently lacks a chartered group for secularist students.

While a secular group for students may not have a spot on SMU’s “Student Organizations” list just yet, a group of active secular humanists are pursuing that goal.

SMU’s Secular Humanist Group (SHG) meets weekly, and though it is a relatively new group, it hopes to become a chartered organization this year, Brandon Bub, SHG president, said.

“[The other founders and I] wanted to make a forum for non-religious students. We realized that there wasn’t really any sort of representation for non-religious students on campus,” said Bub. “We wanted to make a group that could be a haven for non-religious students, and also a place to promote discussion about religion.”

The Secular Humanist Group, affiliated with the National Secular Student Alliance, prides itself as a community for students and faculty who identify as atheists, deists, nontheists, agnostics, humanists or those who simply do not believe in a divine entity.

The group operates much like one of SMU’s many religious organizations. It holds meetings to discuss beliefs and the members’ well being and works on community service projects together.

“We try to do a service project once a semester,” Bub said. “We did a letter-writing campaign for soldiers last semester-specifically non-religious soldiers, because there aren’t really a lot of groups that cater to them.”

Members like Jeff Listman value the feeling of community and solidarity that SHG has to offer.

“As a former Baptist, I miss the community aspect [of religion],” Listman said. “I feel like we have a similar sort of club to religious ones. We all have a similar idea of what the world looks like at meetings we talk about how we’ve been and just hang out.”

SHG also hosts a number of lectures and events throughout the year to both inform and provoke discussions about different religions or religious facets. Most recently, the group invited Dave Fitzgerald, secular writer and activist, to offer his opinion on the seeming illogicalities of Mormonism.

Fitzgerald is in the process of writing a series of books that he claims will debunk Western religion. He offered pamphlets to the audience entitled, “Because religion isn’t just wrong… it’s hilarious” and lectured for an hour about the seeming absurdities of Mormonism, showing images from the popular TV show Southpark.

While some could took offense to the lecture, Fitzgerald and the rest of the audience took the banter lightly, laughing intermittently.

“As you can tell, [this event] was to let off steam,” Ricky Mouser, SMU junior and SHG member, said. Mouser said the kind of satire that Fitzgerald presented was not all that the group had to offer.

“We invite a variety of people to come speak. Last year we had a philosophy professor come in to talk about morality,” Mouser said.