In college, I mean…
Sigh This is beyond tiresome. I can see that I’ll have to add even more wording to my ever-increasing syllabus just to let everyone know ahead of time that a story I assign or a film I show may offend their delicate sensibilities, but they’ll just have to suck it up and deal.
“I will permit the excuse of ‘against my religion’ if I require you to participate. I will not accept it if I merely require you to observe. I will spare you complicity, but I will not spare you your curriculum.”
My high school biology teacher’s maxim when a student walked out on a dissection of rats after protesting that her religion forbade her from taking a life. (She was a neo-pagan of some stripe, I recall.) I always thought it was a fair way to handle it.
Must have been some fairly hardcore intro to bio, if the teacher required students kill their rats themselves 
Shrug, my 9th grade Science labs involved dissection and we mostly did our own killing. The rabbits and chickens were rejects from a local farm.
One is reminded of the vampire in Feet of Clay who is always complaining to the Watch about getting “killed” on the job - in garlic packing, holy water making, pencil factories…
I think I’ve shared this before here, but people who are too religious to participate in their own education are a real PITA.
My grad school advisor had an undergraduate advisee who went to him to complain that one of the professors in the department wasn’t being fair to Christians, and he found that personally offensive. The advisor was in the rather lousy position of having to talk to the other professor to find out what had happened. The other professor (who really is something of a dick) explained that he’d done a lesson about how to cover religion, and that the student took offense to the lesson and how it had been taught. The advisor had a very gentle talk about how, in journalism, you can’t always do your job so as not to offend your sensibilities. He also suggested that the student find a college that better reflected his worldview, and if the student needed a recommendation for a transfer, the advisor would be more than happy to give a good one.
It’s hard for me to read stuff like this and not remember one of my fellow college students.
I went to music school. Writing arrangements of standard jazz tunes was pretty core to the curriculum. One born-again drummer did an arrangement of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. But 5/4 is the devil’s time signature, so he rewrote it in 4/4.
Yeah, it sounded every bit as wrong as you’re now imagining.
Maybe Kathy Bates’ character in The Waterboy wasn’t a wild exaggeration after all.
Damn, you white folks sure have a lot of problems. What charity can I donate to?
Wait, seriously ?
That… I don’t know that I would have been able to do that, specially at 14. I never made me no never mind to cut up dead frogs, rats, cow fetuses (cut out from actual cow placenta ! Med school was fun while it lasted) or sheep eyes… But even now I don’t think I could take a living rat in my hand and just kill it for the purpose of cutting him up immediately after.
Which is probably hypocritical of me, since that’s exactly what most bio teachers do and have to do for their students, and I jolly well expect them to keep doing it For Education! 
Ethics is hard.
Might as well end the thread then, I suppose. This one random guy doesn’t seem to think it’s very interesting.
I’m pretty random. Hate you, though.
He must have loved Unsquare Dance. (7/4, for those who don’t know.)
What is a “time signature” and why would the devil need one?
It made him masturbate like a motherfuck.
So nonwhite people aren’t religious and don’t go to college? Interesting. Or are you just paid by the tiresome Internet cliche?
Totally seriously, but then, we were from a small town (c. 30K people) surrounded by much-smaller villages; pretty much all of us had already taken part in butchering hogs, rabbits or chickens. Getting some earthworms and later some frogs, chloroformizing them and killing them was a lot more… dainty than the process of grabbing a terrified-with-good-reason hog and helping hold her down.
Soylent Juicy, the time signature is both the symbol at the start of a musical score (or sometimes halfway through it) marking how many beats per measure it has and the concept of “beats per measure”. For example, the “1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3…” of waltzes translates in musical terms to “a 3/4 signature”.
And I now feel like I should send Mother R a note letting her know I’m still using those four years’ worth of solfeo, 30 years later… 
even if I can’t remember how it’s spelled in English.
Is this in Leviticus or something? I know what a time signature is, but why is this one in particular considered evil?
Because people want to dance to it. Also, we must fear that which we don’t understand. I’m sure Blue Rondo was written for schizoid Christians (9/8 interspersed with 4/4).
solfeo in English is spelled solfège, although some musicians prefer to spell it solfeggio. We hardly ever bother making our own music technical terms if we can borrow one from the Italians or the French.