Rick Santorum: Education turns US students into Communists !

[TJ in Oregon]

I don't buy the idea that the loss of faith on college campuses is just a result of a critical analysis of one's beliefs and exposure to new ideas. I think alcohol, followed, by sex, possibly followed by other mind altering substances has much more to do with it.  I have a weird perspective on this because I spent four years in a tight-knit community (my college cross-country team) where I'd go to every party but never drink. My perspective is a little weird because no one else seems to stay in the category I've placed myself in for very long; they tend to either stay home or start drinking. (For the record, I’m not anti-alcohol, just anti-drunkenness and anti-breaking the law. I do occasionally have a drink of something in other settings.)

I've seen plenty of people come into college with strict religious beliefs and often but not always some sort of initial repulsion to drinking. Eventually most people will take a drink and start to notice they haven’t been struck by lightning yet. So, they slowly (or in some cases not so slowly) start to get drunk every time there’s a party. Some travel toward the alcoholic direction, but more often sex becomes the more prominent next step. And once people do that, they start to be in a pretty serious conflict with their alleged beliefs. I’m told sex/drunkenness are a lot of fun and I tend to believe it, so it’s not much of a surprise which one wins more often than not. Guilt and repentance aren’t really enjoyable or popular ideas so at the critical early moments before a person’s beliefs have really changed, they are more afraid of and dreading considering where God fits in all of this. Over time, people tend to question what is really wrong with sex to begin with and that usually seems to be the defining issue. For some, this is accompanied by anger at the religious establishment for trying to ‘control’ their lives. I don’t think people just wake up one day and decided to become atheists; it’s something that happens from a long time of cold indifference.

[TJ in Oregon]

...Oh and I think the socialism thing is sort of a straw man argument.

[TJ in Oregon]

I do think that the sex issue can come up either before or without alcohol as well but in my personal opinion that happens less often. There certainly are individuals who take quite a variety of different paths from religion to lack thereof. I also think that the students who take other paths than the one I outlined are less likely to have been particularly religous in the first place. I do think that, as a few people have already pointed out, that people who are 'natural skeptics' tend to start having that opinion at a younger age than college unless they had an incredibly sheltered upbringing (I went to a public high school, and even though it was in a culturally conservative area, I was exposed to other ideas. So college wasn't new for me there and I tend to think most people are in the same boat).

Part of this may be that I went to an engineering school, so the vast majority of my classes don't really involve discussion of religion. I know there are some physics types that will swear to no end that religion is completely incompatible with science or something of the like, but most in the scientific community just ignore the whole issue altogether. When I'm learning about thermodynamics or how to design a distillation column, personal thoughts on religion don't tend to come up much.

I went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. It's primarily a medical/engineering school though it does have some humanities as well. It's not an especially liberal school as far as colleges go and not really a party school either, but liberals certainly outnumber conservatives by a considerable margin.