Uprooting shrubs to make space for healthier plants.

Uprooting stereotypes to make space for healthier relationships.

Christian and atheist students are aiming to do both during their joint community service project at Sandy Creek Nature Center Saturday.

“It’s important for us to put differences aside to make a difference,” said Holly Aversano, the Presbyterian Student Center’s student minister for service.

Aversano and Jason Seidman, community service chairman of the UGAtheists, decided together on the forest restoration project at Sandy Creek.

“We definitely wanted to do an interfaith project,” Seidman said.

“We just wanted to get together and say we’re not so bad.”

Seidman said UGAtheist events such as August’s Stone a Heathen Day — during which group members asked passersby to throw water balloons at them in keeping with a biblical command to stone blasphemers — may seem combative toward religion.

But he said his group holds nothing against religious people.

They want to promote academic debate about the matter.

And working alongside Christians for the same goal gives both groups a chance to realize their similarities, he said.

Though Seidman and Aversano chose to volunteer at Sandy Creek because it was one of few projects that could accommodate their groups, the Presbyterian center’s campus ministry intern said Christians have reasons to be environmentalists.

“This earth is not ours,” Mitch Roper said. “It is God’s. It isn’t ours to exploit.”

By working alongside atheist students, Roper said his group is building a bridge across a not-often-crossed gap.

“Both parties can learn from one another,” he said. “The kingdom of God is all about people from all walks of life and belief systems working together. Stereotypes can be shattered or deconstructed.”

One stereotype Seidman said he hopes to dispel? That atheists are devil worshipers because they do not believe in God.

“We want to put a new face on atheism,” he said.

And in the process, put a new face on Sandy Creek trails.