HypocrisyJeff Soyer on 22 Mar 2013 06:00 am
Another Attack on Christianity
Another attack on Christianity goes unreported by NBC, ABC, CBS, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and NPR. I guarantee you that if it had involved the name of Mohammed, they’d have covered it like a blanked. Instead, nothing. From Fox News:
A Florida Atlantic University student said he was punished after he refused a professor’s directive to stomp on a piece of paper with the word “Jesus” written on it. The university, meanwhile, is defending the assignment as a lesson in debate.
Because liberals have decided that only they have the right to define what is or isn’t intolerance and “hate speech”.
7 Responses to “Another Attack on Christianity”
Leave a Reply
(Be sure to answer the anti-spam question!)
on 22 Mar 2013 at 7:18 pm # m m good
The first two paragraphs below are quoted from the Fox News item cited by Mr. Soyer. The 2nd paragraph contains Fox News’ quotation of the disputed classroom exercise.
Fox News obtained a synopsis of the lesson that got Rotela in trouble.
“Have the students write the name JESUS in big letters on a piece of paper,” the lesson reads. “Ask the students to stand up and put the paper on the floor in front of them with the name facing up. Ask the students to think about it for a moment. After a brief period of silence instruct them to step on the paper. Most will hesitate. Ask why they can’t step on the paper. Discuss the importance of symbols in culture.”
Do yourself a favor, before swinging for the rhetorical fences, and read the last three sentences of the account of the classroom exercise. “Most will hesitate. Ask why they can’t step on the paper. Discuss the importance of symbols in culture.”
The exercise was intended to evoke a refusal to carry out the requested action, and then to go on to a discussion of the reasons for the refusal. (Why would one refuse to step on a paper on which one had, oneself, written a word? What is the difference between stepping on a grocery list, and stepping on the name of a religious figure which one has written oneself, etc., etc.)
Given how easy it is to be misunderstood, the person who designed the exercise made a mistake. It would have been better, given the intent of the exercise, for the teacher to ask the students to IMAGINE that someone would ask them to carry out the offensive action, and not to allow himself to be identified as the originator of the offensive request.
How a classroom exercise designed to explore cultural sensitivities managed to to go so completely off the tracks, we don’t know. Perhaps in practice, the exercise was badly bungled. Maybe the teacher was a dolt and didn’t know how to steer his class towards the intended lesson.
One thing we do know is that if you go through life looking for examples of perfidy by people whom you label as “not my sort”, you won’t have much difficulty in finding your examples. In your mind, a fairly innocent little classroom exercise becomes an attack on Christianity.
on 22 Mar 2013 at 7:27 pm # Jeff Soyer
Then why didn’t he have the students tromp on Mohammed’s name? And why was the student thrown out of the class?
on 22 Mar 2013 at 8:35 pm # m m good
I suppose the reason why the name Jesus and not the Buddha or Mohammed or Zoroaster or Yahweh is that the exercise was taking place in Florida. To be effective, the exercise needed the students to consider (in their imagination) stepping on the name of their own religious figure and not someone else’s.
If you want to point out that the same classroom exercise, with Mohammed’s name substituted for Jesus, would be impossible in most of the Muslim world, unfortunately, I have to agree.
As for what happened afterwards, I don’t think we have adequate information to form an opinion. All we know is that the situation, designed to be an intellectual exercise, escalated to a conflict.
And by the way, as for going through life reacting to the projected bad intentions of people who are not our sort, that is a universal habit. Certainly, it is a habit of mine. But I think, sometimes we can recognize the habit and ask if there are not more benign explanations that fit better.
Again, the teacher may have been a dolt and made a complete mess of the exercise. I hope that anyone else attempting the same exercise would have the sense to frame the exercise as an imagined situation.
on 23 Mar 2013 at 2:54 pm # m m good
Sorry, this is already more than the incident deserves, but one more comment.
To begin with, the reporting of this story began with an item on a local TV station. In this report, did we see an interview with the instructor? with any supervisor of the instructor? with other students in the class who may have had another take on the proceedings? Was there some effort made to find out what the instructor was trying to do and by what means? None of the above. A student newspaper would have done a better job of reporting. And what did the FAU student newspaper report about the incident? Nothing. I checked their site.
Did you notice that the teacher of the class is an instructor? I don’t know if you happen to know what that means. An instructor is a person so low on the academic totem pole, that he isn’t even on the academic totem pole. The people who clean the classrooms have considerably more job security. Instructors are the academic proletariat. They get paid, poorly, by the course, with no benefits, and have to work several jobs in order to get by. They get hired on an as–needed basis when the department administration needs a warm body to stick in front of an introductory class. They get handed a textbook and told to teach out of the textbook. They have no time to do quality class preparations, so they take ready made exercises out of a teacher’s manual prepared by the publisher.
Instructors don’t mount attacks on Christianity, and if they do, they don’t get defended by the department chairman, who just wants the introductory classes to somehow run smoothly, and not to be bothered.
I conjecture that the instructor here was not the brightest person ever to teach a college class. And that he bungled a classroom exercise that he took ready made out of the teacher’s manual handed to him, an exercise that actually had a laudable purpose, but was poorly designed. The purpose of the exercise was to explore cultural sensitivities by touching a cultural nerve, and then to bring the issues involved into the open, so that they can be analyzed. Comatus might tell us that this would be better done by someone trained in classical philosophy, and I would agree. It is obvious to me that the exercise is something that needs to be done thoughtfully, in order to touch cultural sensitivities without starting a riot. It is obvious to me that the whole thing needed to be framed, if it were done at all, as an IMAGINED situation, just as Socrates would have done.
Exactly what happened in the class and afterwards, we don’t get to know. A good part of that is privileged information, and another part just wasn’t reported by the one news organization that took an interest in the story in the first place.
But what I find interesting, and a bit horrifying, is how various secondary news organizations and blogs and comments on blogs, and comments on comments on blogs, took the little bit of available information and expanded upon it. Try googling the name of the instructor. You will find dozens of items each repeating what was found in other items, each adding a layer of conjecture, extrapolation, outrage and vilification.
With all that, and from the little bit of biographical information available to me after a few minutes search, I would conjecture that the instructor is actually a fairly unexceptional black southern church–attending man, who really doesn’t need his life to be ruined because he (stupidly) followed the teaching plan handed to him.
on 25 Mar 2013 at 7:40 pm # NotClauswitz
If they did that here in CA it would be considered a hate-crime against Mexicans since “Jesus” is pronounced rather differently than in more Anglicized parts, but the same could be said for Florida with a large Hispanic population.
Anyhow Xtians don’t go around beheading people.
on 26 Mar 2013 at 1:16 pm # Rob Crawford
“I would conjecture that the instructor is actually a fairly unexceptional black southern church–attending man”
He’s a Democrat party official. If he attends a church it’s one like Obama’s Hatin’ Whitey congregation.
on 26 Mar 2013 at 1:47 pm # m m good
http://lighthousewccogic.com/statementoffaith.html